This year has seen three titans of rock and roll return with fans for the most part highly anticipating the new alums but also highly skeptical the results. How could a band with some members in their sixties riding on the longest wait between albums deliver anything stellar? Or one who's courtroom antics and previous album all but alienated their fan-base to the point of revolt against them? And how could a band who's only remaining member was a prima donna lead singer who had been working on a somewhat mythical album for the past 14 or so years ever give us something worthy of listening to? I thought about all of these albums long and hard and I've listened extensively to all as well. i will admit that AC/DC was the only group I really had any confidence in as I felt their last effort, Stiff Upper Lip, had been a glorious return to roots and was eager to hear what they could come up with next. The others instilled in me more of a morbid curiosity, like watching a car wreck, though I was pleasantly surprised by one. And I also considered reviewing these albums separately but in starting said reviews I found they often referenced each other so here it is in a giant super review.
I have never been a fan of the Brian Johnson era of AC/DC. Back in Black had some songs I enjoy, as did Razor's Edge and Ballbreaker but most of their output with him at the helm had been underwhelming and it was not until 2000's stellar Stiff Upper Lip that it felt like the AC/DC I loved. However, they had always struck me as a band that was not ever trying to outdo themselves or to attain that next level. They were simply there to rock and they would write the music accordingly. As a result, it felt like their transition to Stiff Upper Lip and in turn their newest, Black Ice, felt so much more natural than most bands. They are first and foremost and rock and roll band and while they may have dabbled in heavy metal and the like through the years, their roots have always been in hard rock and so the blueprint was always there. Metallica on the other hand, gave something completely different on the Rick Rubin produced Death Magnetic in that it feels so much like a band actively trying to prove themselves to those who had lost interest and to regain the roots they had in some ways abandoned for one way or another. As the album progresses you can almost feel the time and effort that went into studying highs and lows of previous efforts to make something truly vicious and heavy and say "we know who we are." That is not to say that bands cannot stretch their legs and reach for new heights, but their is something to be said for taking a blueprint and adding on to the building, rather than erecting an entirely different structure after the previous one is built. There are bands who have accomplished the latter, to be sure, and with such accomplishment comes great respect and opens massive creative avenues. When a band fails in that regard, however, it is usually a failure so complete and massive that the very integrity of the band, however important that may be, is forever tarnished. Some would say that Guns N Roses tarnished themselves deeply with 1993's "The Spaghetti Incident?" a vile collection of punk and glam rock covers that served, until now, as the last and horrific vestige of a once great band, though it is quite clear now that the long-awaited Chinese Democracy is not the messianic return of the band as Axle Rose had often heralded it. In fact, if Metallica's Death Magnetic can be seen as some glorious atonement, than this album is it's polar opposite. Perhaps if we had tasted other albums from GnR I would have been more forgiving. But the bad taste of "The Spaghetti Incident?" and most of the Use You Illusion albums was simply too much and an album nothing short of life-changing would be acceptable.
In Black Ice, AC/DC has delivered to us their longest running album to date, clocking in at just over 55 minutes and at times, it does drag. With 15 songs, I would certainly have been okay with five or six being cut from the final product as the album, as strong as it is, unfortunately closes on a bore. Stop the songs at track ten and you have a classic and solid album but while the length does stain the product ever so slightly and keeps it from being the perfect album, it also does not drag it down enough to completely ruin the experience. For the most part it is a tribute to the dictum that less is more, something that AC/DC lost track of at some point and for the first time ever in Brian Johnson's tenure, I can almost imagine Bon Scott singing most of these songs, with Johnson not merely screaming at all times, rather there is a swagger that I rarely feel from the frontman. It took them almost thirty years, but I feel like they have finally picked up where they left off when Bon died.
In turn, one could almost say that Death Magnetic serves as almost an alternative-reality Metallica. To put it more suffice: Imagine Cliff Burton had not died. I still regard ... And Justice For All and The Black Album, (as it has come to be called) as flawed classics. I love them and would not want to give them up though they had not always felt like true Metallica albums, or maybe they were simply natural reactions to the loss they had sustained. We'll never know for sure. However, listening to Death Magnetic at times is much like looking into the past. I imagine a nexus point in realities where time and space split apart and this is the Metallica unbroken and whole. It clocks in at almost twenty minutes longer than the AC/DC effort but it almost never feels like it drags. With the exception of only a few moments, the songs are fast, brutally so even. And while Lars Ulrich has certainly been a better drummer, it is great to hear him giving it his all in ways he has not done in years, quite possibly since Master of Puppets in 1986. But like I said, sometimes this album feels like it is trying to appease its listener and sometimes I imagine Russel Crow in Gladiator yelling to a Colosseum of confused watchers asking "are you not entertained?" But maybe it is just me and my initial lack of faith that after my image of Metallica as more than human gods was more or less destroyed by watching Some Kind Of Monster.
Chinese Democracy feels way too long. And at a torturous 71 minutes, it certainly is. The stories of Axl Rose's eccentricities and how reclusive he has been since the collapse of the original band are now famous and he has even been dubbed the "Howard Hughes of Rock and Roll." Guns N Roses as a collective was young and loud and their songs got to the point. They were not Pink Floyd and they were not Led Zeppelin. They were not supposed to be. They were Guns N Roses. And you know, I got Use Your Illusion. I didn't always like it per se, but I understood what they were going for and I'll stand behind those records even though I wish that it had just been one records with most of the fat trimmed off but that is beside the point. Chinese Democracy doesn't even feel like an extension of that and it is not Guns N Roses. It is Axl's new solo project and it was clearly not just him that made GnR so great. It was Slash and Duff and Izzy and Steven as well that made them so great and Axl is not greater than the sum of those parts. I'm not sure what I was expecting from this but I will say that it draws far to heavily upon new rock. Almost like it is a cheap knock off of those bands that were cheap knock offs of Guns N Roses itself. Only on top of that there is odd electronic ambiance and a digital precision present that makes it feel like anything but a raw and dirty rock and roll band. It is Guns N Roses for the Creed set, for the Nickleback set.
These albums are all interesting in their own ways but only two can be called anything close to good. And considering the sources of the material, perhaps two out of three is not all that bad. There have certainly been more than a few let downs in the history of rock and roll comebacks and it is nice to see that they are not all hopeless.
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