Snark and Reverb

I swear to God I thought it would be cock rock.

I really, really did.  Last week sometime a fellow rock snob friend of mine sends me a text along the lines of “r u gettin new gnr”, to which I replied “yes, but it will be cock rock”, to which he replied “lol”.  This is definitely one of those albums I had completely figured out years ago, actually a decade or more ago, which makes it the longest time I’ve ever had an album figured out before its release.   Surely it would be an over produced throw away joke, rife with cheesy lyrics, awful vocals, and brick walled compression that makes Death Magnetic look like a 1980s Barry Diament master?  Right?  I mean, we know that Buckethead and Robin Fincke are taking on guitar duties, which on any other album would be the greatness, but here we have Axl Rose at the helm: crazy, insane, and crazy Axl Rose.  Of course he will find a way to ruin it!

Nope.  Chinese Democracy rocks, and I can’t stop listening to it.

I grew up on metal when I was in grade school.  I thankfully made the progression that southern adolescents with a penchant for rocking are bound to make, from the poppy story driven country of No Fences-era Garth Brooks to the waiting arms of the two godheads of early 90s metal: Metallica and Guns N’ Roses.  I sat in awe of the pure rebellious testosterone of Appetite, and continued to sit in awe as I was turned on to Lies, wherein Axl croons to a girl about not having sex and still manages to be a total badass.  But where GNR really enriched my musical upbringing was on the Use Your Illusion I & II.  I spent countless days after school watching the “November Rain” video, picking apart the beautiful but insane lyrics, comparing them to the imagery, rocking my pre-teen air guitar skills, drooling over Stephanie Seymour, and wondering why the hell that guy jumps over the cake when it started raining? Also how did she die?  Did she get struck by lightning?  What was going on there?  I also spent Saturday nights staying up for the Headbanger’s Ball, so I could marvel with my hero Riki Rachtman at the strangeness, awesomeness, and sheer bigness of UYI’s underappreciated epic, “Estranged”.  Of course there was also snickering in the back of the minivan as someone’s mom was aghast when “Back Off Bitch” or “Get in the Ring” came on.  And pointing out over and over that “Live and Let Die” was actually a Paul McCartney song, and he was a Beatle, and The Beatles aren’t metal, so what the hell.   And “Don’t Cry”, with the line “don’t you cry tonight / there’s a heaven above you baby”.  Jesus!  Even writing this now I’m realizing it’s amazing that Axl was able to pull off those lines with total earnestness, never even skating the lines of cheesiness.  But could I really be expected to think he’d be able to do the same 17 years later?  Just shy of two decades?

And don’t forget there is no Slash!  Slash is gone!  Where will Axl be without Slash, smoking in the shower and falling off the wagon every two years?  Remember that picture where he is smoking in the shower?  How can it be Guns N’ Roses without that?  And what about Duff McStradlin?  Wait, nevermind, only Axl and Slash matter.

The truly great things about Chinese Democracy can be summed up in the three things I forgot about Axl Rose:

1. I forgot that Axl can write a hell of a melody.  Composition and performance wise, the vocals on Chinese Democracy are simply outstanding.  Sure, there is some serious pro-tooling effects going on with some of the vocal tracks.  However, while sometimes this is to their detriment, on the majority of songs it works and sounds great.  See “Better”, “Catcher in the Rye”, “Street of Dreams” for good examples.  While we are on the subject, critics are already poopooing “Street of Dreams” as the cheeseball track, but I’ll put myself out there and say the only thing cheesey about it is the name.  The song works on every level, from the instrumentation to the true emotion in the vocals.  I would say 51% of the joy I’m getting out of this record is just listening to Axl wail, whether he is singing or just humming along with the melody, and I don’t care if some of the vocals were cut ten years ago or last week.  The point is they are here now, immortalized on record, and they are amazing.

2. I forgot that Axl knows a rocking guitar solo when he hears one, and Chinese Democracy is rife with them.  Sure, the guitars may be different from Slash outside a chapel in the desert tearing a mournful riff to the godless hot summer air, which to this day might be the most badass rock imagery of all time, but they are perfect in their own way.  Far from somehow squelching the talents of his lead guitar players, he really lets them rip into the stratosphere with their notes, soaring into secret genius heights the likes of which Michael Houser spent his tragically too short career exploring.

3. I forgot that Axl writes enigmatic sociopathic lyrics that I just can’t get enough of.  Its like I’m a kid again, back on the floor in front of the TV singing every single line to “November Rain”.  I love Axl’s insane lyrics, and songs like “Catcher in the Rye” prove that he’s still got enough crazy to make my brain hurt trying to figure them out: “When all is said and done / we’re not the only ones / who look at life this way / that’s what the old folks say / but everytime I see them / makes me wish I had a gun / if I thought that I was crazy / well I guess I’d have more fun”.  There is so much awesome in that line it makes me want to shriek like a little girl.  Who is looking at life this way with Axl?  I mean who is “we”?  What way are we looking at life?  Who are these old folks?  Wait though, wait, its not crazy enough, not quite yet, wait for it… wait for it… YES!  When you see “them” it makes you wish you had a gun, yes!  Thats what Axl needs is a gun, and in fact multiple times on Chinese Democracy he expresses his desire for a firearm.  Honestly, he had me at “I’ve got an itchy finger and there’ll be hell to pay / I’m gunna pull the trigger and blow them all away” from the album’s second track “Shackler’s Revenge”.

Since I don’t find the album to be negatively heavy handed as some other critics do, I can only find one aspect that could be called a fault: it’s busy as all hell.  Axl had a great deal of time on his hands to tweak, polish, and edit every single track over and over, the end result of which is a layered wall of sound so congested and complex that unfortunately some instruments can get lost in the mix.  Sometimes Axl’s vocals, or one of the ripping guitar solos lose their dynamics against a massive background of strings, trip hop beats, or industro glitch effects.  This effect is present on both the CD and the vinyl LP, both of which, by the way, are excellently mastered despite the density of the mix (I haven’t done a straight comparison between the two, but feel free to contact me in the coming weeks, as I’m sure by then I’ll have had the opportunity to do so).

Having made this criticism, I’ll counter myself and say the album simply wouldn’t be what it is if it wasn’t so busy.  All the simultaneous sound is what contributes to the album’s superb richness: it is the complexity that makes Chinese Democracy a true cohesive whole, as opposed to just fourteen very good songs, and this is what pushes Chinese Democracy from very good territory into greatness.  Every fan of music should own this album, and in listening marvel not just at it’s history, but also its musical excellence.

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On the album’s title track, slow, pummeling drums, thick heavy bass and a grungy guitar power through a sludgey veiled soundscape while barely understandable raspy rubbing alcohol vocals tell of a dead god resurrected
through the power of arcane human sacrifice.

If this sounds enticing, take a few minutes and check out the album opener “Fury Whip”. Its really all you need to determine if High on Fire’s blend of power trio stoner whiskey metal and medieval black magick war imagery is for you.

Actually, taking into account the band’s prefered historical setting for its lyrics (apparently sometime in the first 1000 years CE), I should maybe call it stoner mead metal.  I drank mead once.  A friend of mine bought it from a liquor store in Atlanta.  It tastes the way an old hospital smells.

On a preliminary listen, High on Fire’s music encompasses elements from the metal sub-genres of doom and stoner rock, but just when I try to pin down their sound they throw me a progressive curveball, like the middle eastern/Arabic overtones of the instrumental “Khonrad’s Wall”, courtesy of guest musicians on a tambour and 12-string.  Or the random and unrelated instrumental bit at the end of their perfect pounding metal pummeller “Cyclopian Scope” (a song, by the way, which is about the Annunaki, a race of alien lizard people who supposedly came to our planet thousands of years ago to enslave apes to mine gold, because they needed gold to repair their destroyed atmosphere on their home planet.  Then, if I recall correctly [which can be difficult, a friend of mine and I were obsessed with a conspiracy theory having to do with the Annunaki, but this was several years ago during a particularly hazy time in college], the lizards had sex with the apes and made people.  Now the Annunaki run international banking).

While the album’s dark fantasy world is gorgeous, rich, and filled with doom,  Black One it ain’t, because High on Fire still brings the fast metal, as evidenced by straight up bangers like “Turk”, a more traditional metal song with more traditional metal subject matter of violence, drugs, and dark sexual deviancy. Even when they aren’t kicking out the faster songs, High on Fire has a knack for bringing a high energy and intensity to a veiled soundscape.

Then there is the album’s masterpiece, a three piece song suite which starts with “Headhunter”, simply a war drum solo that builds into the suite’s meat, “Rumours of War”, a raw, focused, and totally gnarly all out metal battle. “Rumours” strength is in its focused simplicity.  If one just heard the verses it could be mistaken for hardcore punk, which means it makes for a hell of a great headbanger.  Ending the suite is the album’s most beautiful piece, “DII”, another steady paced song driven on warm bass, thick drums, and lead guitar that does all the storytelling the song needs, against the backdrop of a quiet but gorgeous Mellotron riff, which gets a deserved solo spotlight to close out the suite.

The album concludes fittingly with “Return to Nod”, a hero story in the Beowulf archetype, in which a warrior spills blood and kicks major monster ass, his story thereon being told all across High on Fire’s black fantasy land.  Its a fitting ending to an album that I keep wanting to call “brutal”, but there is an unavoidable grace to the whole thing that prevents me from doing so.  While the music’s power and subject matter makes me feel like this violent demon train could fly off the tracks at any point, the musicians’ confidence and precision consistently thrill me without devolving into disappointing sloppiness.

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