3 reviews of Chinese Democracy

Hooray!

1 Chuck Klosterman, AV Club
2 Ben Greenman, The New Yorker
3 David Fricke, Rolling Stone

*Update
Let's add Sebastian Bach (of Skid Row) #4

I just read Ian Cohen's Pitchfork review, a collection of clichés possibly plagiarized from Jon Pareles. Did he listen to the album? (His comparisons to REO Speedwagon and Journey seem less musical than verbal or visual, like he was imagining their logos and thinking of what wearing their t-shirt might mean. If you were looking for references based in musical resemblance, I might suggest that Axl sounds, at different points, like Donald Fagen, Don Henley, Robert Wyatt, and Frank Zappa, though it is more to the point to note that Axl's voice is unique in rock music, and that the many voices on Chinese Democracy are clearly his, even through all the digital editing, which his narrative personality somehow manages to master). Can Cohen teach us anything about the music? Jon Pareles, at least, makes the helpful observation that the album concludes with five power ballads in a row (Ben Greenman suggests that the ballads are the key to the album

**Update 2
Like many critics, Simon Reynolds at Salon seems to have written his review of Chinese Democracy without listening to it. He sounds smart when bringing his readers up to speed on "the loudness wars" (=the record company wants their song to be the loudest and crunchiest thing on the radio, so their mastering engineers are forced to compress all the dynamic nuances out of it), yet his claim that Chinese Democracy raises the "signature defects" of compression to "a hideous intensity" appears to be factually false. Bob Ludwig, who mastered the album, writes (#5) that the final mix uses way less compression than the industry typically demands of a contemporary rock release, which makes Reynolds seem like a bit of a phony. Reynolds: "The result [of all the compression and Pro-Tools], audible on 'Chinese Democracy,' is a bionic precision that forgoes any real looseness and swing." No real looseness or swing? "There Was A Time," "Catcher in the Rye," "Riad n' the Bedouins," "Scraped," and "Sorry" are all pretty swinging at points (there are sustained grooves for dancing, driving quarter notes with dreamy implied dotted pulses at the next rhythmic subdivision, swaying circular rhythms at half the speed, you are ecstatically moving forward and the drummer is driving the thing