SpaceInsomniac said: "jakob187 said: "Album is full of sloshy bullshit. Axl needed to keep this album on indefinite hiatus, cancelled, fucking burned in a bonfire and trashed completely.
The fucking Spaghetti Incident was better than this shit!
"
Since when the hell is hateful trolling hyperbole worthy of + votes? There were several posters that admitted to not liking the album, but no comment was voted + until a loudmouth spewed hateful exaggerations without even a hint of attempting to explain WHY they didn't like the album.
If someone enters a thread and bashes the topic of the thread while not contributing anything that is remotely useful or thoughtfully critical, that is trolling. It is not something that faceless morons should be encouraging."
It's me. I hate everything, and pretty much everyone on these boards...including lord...knows that.
If you REALLY want me to offer my constructive opinion, I can do that...but it's not NEARLY as fun. But, here goes:
The album is weak in general. Axl's words aren't nearly as insightful and poignant as they were when Appetite or the Illusions came out. Even on the softest songs from Illusions, you still felt like you were listening to ROCK. On this, it feels more like Enya. The fact that Axl would even go so far as to listing himself as rock and/or METAL (look at his MySpace) is beyond me, because when I listened to the record, I heard a bunch of wussy-ass piano, a song that might as well have been played from Bob Marley's ass, and a weak attempt to recreate "November Rain"...which would be "This I Love". "Street of Dreams" is about the only song that even holds a candle to the previous Guns material, and that's probably because Bumblefoot's solo fucking SOARS on that track.
And that's the problem: this album is all about the moments that Bumblefoot is allowed to come out of Axl's shadow and say "check this lick out, it's fuckin' sick". The rest of it is incessant whining. I will give you that Axl's voice sounds better at times on this album than it ever has, but nothing stands above "Don't Cry" or "Civil War". I'm all for a band evolving their sound (I mean, my favorite band IS Tool, after all), but this form of evolution is a massive downgrade from what GnR used to be about: the seedy underbelly of California, the lost love that will never return, the absence of unity in this world...and instead, it's been traded in for music that is half-hearted, mild slosh thrown onto a piece of plastic.
Axl could've released an all-piano and orchestra album after 10 years, and I wouldn't have honestly cared...as long as it was well-written. Listen to the lyrics on "Better"...then compare them to any generic song from Hinder or Velvet Revolver or any other band getting played on the radio. Even a track like "Chinese Democracy" fails miserably to be a good rock song, and instead, it follows the same generic pattern that everyone else is doing. Granted, that may work to sell records, but we're talking about a band that has released a total of five albums (I'm not counting Live Era)...and all but one of those are classics (and the one being excluded is the shittiness that is The Spaghetti Incident).
Would the album had been better if Slash, Duff, and the rest of the crew were still there? Probably, yeah. The question really rises to being this: is this a GUNS 'N' ROSES album? That is basically the same question as saying is THE FRAGILE a NINE INCH NAILS album? If Guns 'n' Roses has always been about Axl Rose and no one else, then I guess it is a Guns 'n' Roses album, and it's a poor one compared to his previous work. If this is an Axl Rose album, then it's a totally different machine.
Had he not labeled it as a GUNS 'N' ROSES album...maybe I'd feel differently. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. This is NOT a Guns 'n' Roses album. This is the Axl Rose show.
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