... where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.

How glorious to wake up on the on the first day of December to the first proper snowfall. It’s a very thin covering of snow but it’s still there and it’s very exciting.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. What I wanted to talk about is Chinese Democracy; the new Guns N’ Roses album. I’m going to say from the off that I haven’t heard it or indeed any songs from it but I have read a few reviews, my favorite being a really weird review. The opening paragraph from this review reads:

“Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It’s more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom?”

This is a good way of putting it. Chinese Democracy is the first GNR album since 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident? with work starting on Chinese Democracy in about 1994. Basically fourteen years in the making. Many people thought that this album was never going to see the light of day and what amuses me more is this is supposed to be the first in a trilogy of albums. How the hell long will that take?! We might see the last album being released in about 40 years.

Most reviews seem to be in agreement that most of the songs are brilliant, some are ok, but some are a bit naff. For someone who thinks that Axl Rose vanished up his own arse sometime ago I thought the whole album would only be able to be reviewed starting with the sentence “It’s ok, but...” I’m also worried that this album might have just ended up as a parody of GNR. I site the classic film This Is Spinal Tap.

Will I buy the Chinese Democracy album? I don’t know. For an album that has been fourteen years in the making I should. It should be awesome, each song should be amazing, but I don’t want to hear it in case it’s not. How do you make an album that was initially conceived fourteen years ago sound modern? In my mind it’s probably not going to sound that different from any modern rock album. The only major selling point is that it’s a GNR album, and that isn’t a good enough reason in my opinion.

Has anyone heard this album? Is it good?