Seems a tad out of sync, delayed audio .1 sec with VLC.

First up is SWA.  Don’t recall hearing them before, this is pretty terrible.  Singer’s blatant Jaggerisms unattractive.  Wearing fedora with card tucked into brim, wielding tambourine.  Should be beaten severely.  Bald attention-whore bassist shaking like Flea.  Like Ratt but shittier and more pretentious.

Next up: Saccharine Trust.  Significant improvement.  Vocals still not very good but far better guitar skronk and far lower douche quotient.  Ew, track with intoned faux-poetic spoken lyrics like some Slint post-rock forerunner.  Ugh.  Still, good guitar, subject worthy of further investigation, always looking for good non-shitty underground non-mainstream oriented rock, especially from this era.

Now to the “name” bands, starting with the only band still active (and with only a drummer change at that), the Meat Puppets. Unrehearsed half-assed version of “Sea of Love” wastes a couple minutes, gets off to a real start with “Up On The Sun”.  Fairly solid but plagues by the trademark erratically-pitched vocals that would tend to characterize the band until around the time of their post-Nirvana breakthrough.  Hmm, Hendrix’s “Little Wing” another odd cover choice, but one that seems better-practiced–into the Allmans’ “Midnight Rider” done speed-punk style.  Cute.  A bit too much of the wacky side of the Puppets and not enough of the solid side for me though.

Perhaps the rarest of the footage is that of the Minutemen, oddly enough starting off with what has become their best-known song, “Corona” (though it’s admittedly only “The Jackass Theme” to most people).  D. Boon in action is a rare sight, making pretty much every minute of the Minutemen segment fascinating.  “Lost” jam finale with Puppet Curt Kirkwood on vocals is fun, but more prime D. Boon would again have been preferable.

Finally, the headliners, Husker Du. I somehow get the feeling Husker Du records are probably primarily bought these days by teenage/college-age Nirvana/Foo Fighters fans working their way backwards through the band’s influences, though I may be wrong of course.  The dynamic on display here is hard to ignore as a direct Nirvana precedent, certainly, and anyone looking here for evidence of such will not be disappointed — watch this and tell me Grant Hart here isn’t Dave Grohl before Dave Grohl was Dave Grohl. If anything, it’s striking how much the mainstream subsequently moved toward what’s on display from Husker Du here, and it makes me wonder how much money Husker Du is leaving on the table right now, frankly.  A solid performance from front to back and an adequate replication of their trebly cymbal/distortion overtone-heavy album sound with the exception of slightly more audible bass. “Eight Miles High” cover goes on a bit. “Makes No Sense At All” closer hits like “Teen Spirit”.

“All-star”"Louie Louie” finale with pretty much everyone notable from all bands jamming together is kinda fun but let’s face it, the novelty punk cover button has franklybeen pushed too many times already at this point.

Altogether, a worthwhile artifact and a unique snapshot of a bygone moment in time.

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It’s like someone freeze-dried N’Sync. Terrifying.

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As it turned out I was right. That individual calls himself ChrisGoesRock and his current venue is a blog called The Blog of Huddinge Hill.   Through everything from blues to folk, vinyl rips to digital bootlegs, and the 1950s to the 2000s, he (I’m assuming he’s a he…which seems a safe assumption) maintains an incredibly high standard of quality without coming off at all like an elitist douche, which any reader of Pitchfork will be able to tell you is not at all easy to do.

The Blog of Huddinge Hill is one of my regular visiting spots, and ChrisGoesRock and the music he posts has given me many hours of enjoyment, so I just wanted to give my thanks and encouragement in hope that he continues digging up obscure gems for years to come.

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Suffice to say Chinese Democracy is not a masterpiece, nor does it accomplish the nigh-impossible task of matching up to the work of an almost completely different band from a lifetime ago.  That said, it is a record that deserves to be evaluated on its own merits, which is what I’ll attempt to do here as much as is humanly possible.

The album doesn’t flow particularly well, betraying its fragmented genesis — songs lurch this way and that in ADD fashion, rarely settling into any particular groove for too long and frequently introducing distracting effects and instrumentation.  Several WTF moments punctuate the disc (particularly the bizarre acapella intro to “Scraped”) and definitely burst any remaining illusion that this could be the product of an actual band rather than a single overwhelming force of ego.

Speaking of whom, Axl is in fairly good voice throughout, though it’s somewhat disconcerting to hear obvious use of autotune processing throughout the record.  He also tends to emphasize the melodic aspects of his singing above raw power, his true strength, and it does get a bit wearying over the course of the album’s 71-minute length — one keeps hoping for the band to hit more on the heavy rock groove and less on the over-arranged Queen ballad side.

Altogether, while no, Chinese Democracy is not a classic for the ages or what one would maybe hope for from one of the biggest rock bands in the world, it’s a pretty solid record, on a par with a good Alice Cooper album, and will likely hold up for several listens even if it’s not likely to become a favorite.  It’s hard to picture anyone singing any of these songs at karaoke night, but it’s equally difficult to picture a large percentage of longtime Guns N’ Roses fans being completely dissatisfied with this album.  More importantly, now that Axl has broken the dam, perhaps he can get the next one out in a more reasonable amount of time and perhaps avoid the painfully labored-over, yeah-let’s-throw-the-kitchen-sink-in-too vibe that’s substantially in evidence here.

Some spontaneity would be a welcome novelty for the followup.  And hey, how about some straight-ahead, flat-out rockers? Maybe listen to more AC/DC and less Queen.  That’s be nice.

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