this is not pitchfork

[Some people see these as separate albums, some as one double album. Call it what you'd like. I'd prefer to just get these reviews over with in one shot. Also, I understand that my negative opinion of these albums is a minority opinion. Last time I wrote about these albums - and Axl - on an old blog, I got death threats. They were amusing and frightening at the same time]

My history with Axl and company is a long and complicated one. I imagine that most metal fans who hooked on to the early GnR bandwagon followed the same path I did. Think of the seven stages of grief in reverse. From acceptance (Appetite for Destruction = welcome to my record collection) to denial (I swear to you I never owned The Spaghetti Incident), we watched – and in some ways participated in – the slow death of a once great band. But it wasn’t their years of putting out head banging, fist pumping music that was the greatest show. No, it was watching Axl Rose trying in vain to raise the phoenix from the ashes that offered the most jaw dropping, car-wreck kind of entertainment this side of the November Rain video. But that’s another story and another review called Chinese Democracy.

I was looking forward to these albums. It had been about three years since Lies (which did not float my boat the way Appetite did). I think of each new album we wait for from a band we love is like the promise of hot, dirty sex after your partner has been away for a while. Well, my lust for the band kind of faded upon the release of these discs. It was then I realized that GnR was the equivalent of the girl who teases you with her perky breasts for years and when you finally manage to get under the hood, you grab hold of three inches of padded bra. All that music before Use Your Illusion was just a ruse to get us to this point. They gave us the good stuff first so they could later on sit back and make this pretentious, melodramatic drivel that they called art. There was nothing left to them. Empty D cups.

From the Harlequin romance of November Rain to trying-too-hard Civil War, the Illusion albums left me feeling frustrated and unfulfilled, which is not an easy thing to do when there are 30 songs to choose from. Bottom line is, my relationship with GnR boils down to a fabulous one night stand with Appetite, and a lot of too-drunk-to-fuck booty calls after that.