Guns N Roses music review

With everyone (including Howard Stern) offering their critique on the leaked Guns N Roses demo songs, you just gotta know that the people here at KFR were champing at the bit to tell you what we think. It took some doing to obtain the mp3s but after obtaining the files and listening to them a couple of times, it’s finally time to offer up what we think of each one:

  • Better - Of the three of them, Better is the best one. However, clocking in at just over 2 minutes, it’s also the shortest. Also, it appears that this one is still a work-in-progress since it abruptly stops at the end. The mix is unprofessionally raw. What’s worse is that Axl Rose’s voice does not seem to be the centerpiece of the song as both the rhythm and lead guitars seem to mask his voice rather than accentuate it. Better has possibilities of being a decent song in the right hands but in its current composition, it can’t really get anything more than an incomplete.
  • IRS - This song seems to be undecided what it wants to be - either a mid-tempo alt-rock one or a quasi-ballad. Rose’s voice is a little stronger but that may be due to the use of acoustic guitar in half of the song. The inclusion of a programmed drum beat doesn’t really work (this might be a theme in Chinese Democracy) and the song just doesn’t seem to go anywhere. IRS should really be called DOA since it’s basically dies right in front of the listener.
  • There Was A Time (TWAT) - This song could be considered the “answer” to September Rain (Ed. note - the song was incorrectly identified; The correct song title was November Rain) and really, bloated doesn’t even begin to describe how overwrought and labored this song is. The intro again brings in another programmed drum beat in a lame attempt to be trip-hop. It then transitions into a song similar to IRS with its overpowering wailing lead. Then, the bridge goes into the aforementioned big, over-produced affair that marked a turning point in the original band’s identity from badass rock-n-roll band to self-important opus-producing Axl Rose and the people who backed him. TWAT really typifies the obvious problem with GNR: Their sound has gone from an ensemble of renegades who made bare-bones hard rock to a lone singer who uses a Casio keyboard as his band.

In closing, I would like to make this observation. The title of the forever-delayed CD, Chinese Democracy, could be applied to the band with only a minor change. GNR is more like a Roman Monarchy with Axl Rose as Nero and has decided to fiddle around with his electronic fetish while all of Rome is burning down around his (and our) ears.

The News, Music