One more thing:
Nov. 28th, 2008 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clappamungusToday's Age review of the new "Guns N' Roses" album, (in quotations because, let's face it, they haven't been Guns N' Roses for years) perfectly sums up my feelings towards it. Except for the whole 3-and-a-half stars thing. It should have been 2-and-a-half at the very most.
I'm very, very glad I didn't actually spend money on it.
Some of the best rock albums were hastily recorded in only a few days. Elvis Presley to Eddy Current Suppression Ring captured their raw essence by running on adrenalin, not big budgets.
The first album in 15 years by Guns N' Roses - actually, make that Axl Rose and his new band (which, as we saw at Rod Laver Arena last year, was no match for the original) - reportedly took 13 years, countless players and studios and tens of millions of dollars to make. And it sounds like it. They've thrown the kitchen sink at this record: piano, strings, guitars - wailing, wah wah and flamenco - beats, and vocals in falsetto and unnerving baritone.
It's as if Rose is trying to pay tribute to the past 50 years of music. The best rock bands, whether it's AC/DC or the Stones, rely on a symbiotic rhythm-lead guitar combination, but Slash and Izzy's ragged playing has been replaced by up to five session players at once. The result is patchy, overblown and more like Use Your Illusion than the street fighter punk rock of their high water mark Appetite for Destruction.
Now that's an album that never could have been made by a multi-millionaire with too much time on his hands.
I'm very, very glad I didn't actually spend money on it.
Some of the best rock albums were hastily recorded in only a few days. Elvis Presley to Eddy Current Suppression Ring captured their raw essence by running on adrenalin, not big budgets.
The first album in 15 years by Guns N' Roses - actually, make that Axl Rose and his new band (which, as we saw at Rod Laver Arena last year, was no match for the original) - reportedly took 13 years, countless players and studios and tens of millions of dollars to make. And it sounds like it. They've thrown the kitchen sink at this record: piano, strings, guitars - wailing, wah wah and flamenco - beats, and vocals in falsetto and unnerving baritone.
It's as if Rose is trying to pay tribute to the past 50 years of music. The best rock bands, whether it's AC/DC or the Stones, rely on a symbiotic rhythm-lead guitar combination, but Slash and Izzy's ragged playing has been replaced by up to five session players at once. The result is patchy, overblown and more like Use Your Illusion than the street fighter punk rock of their high water mark Appetite for Destruction.
Now that's an album that never could have been made by a multi-millionaire with too much time on his hands.
