Is a broken heart to blame for the 15-year delay to Guns N Roses new album?
Throughout the course of Chinese Democracy, Axl Rose repeatedly refers to a “change of heart” and his “lonely tear drops”. “I just can’t let it die, all the pain inside,” he eventually blurts out on This I Love. But if his mind hasn’t been fully devoted to music over the past decade-and-a-half, it doesn’t show. This record is an uncompromising, fully-focused, hard rock monster. At times, it will rattle the rafters with its ferocious riffs. At others, you will laugh out loud at the ridiculously overblown melodrama. In other words, it’s business as usual for Guns N’ Roses. Scattergun Things kick off with the title track. Already heavily previewed on radio, it opens with a montage of sirens and Chinese dialogue before bursting into life with a riff of speaker-endangering proportions and Rose’s trademark falsetto squeal. It’s followed by the pounding Shackler’s Revenge, whose heavily distorted guitar shows Rose has been paying attention to the innovations of Tom Morello and Matt Bellamy.
