Last week I had off from work, and I have another week of idolatry idleness ahead. I received a big box of CDs, and what better way to spend an afternoon than ripping and listening to a bunch of new acquisitions? Best addition to my file server was that second DVD drive that I salvaged from the TV computer; two copies of grip ripping and encoding to MP3 really make this chore into a dream.

Genres represented are all over the place; a bunch of Mint Records releases, some stuff from Matador and Fat Wreck Chords and the like. Another DOA album that I have to re-rip, but I have a feeling it’ll be indistinguishable from any of Joey Shithead‘s last dozen outings. There’s also Blowfly, Star Fucking Hipsters, Lost Sounds, oasis, Cradle of Filth, Bloc Party, Bend Sinister, Slipknot, Weezer, Trivium, We Are Wolves, Straight Reads The Line, Jack’s Mannequin, Fleet Foxes, The Ergs!, and a bunch of other stuff from 2008 and 2009.

I’ve kind of skipped around in it a bit, just to find out what it all sounds like, since so many of these bands aren’t ones I’ve listened to recently, if at all. There are some real winners in there like the Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine) solo disk The Fabled City; big surprise for me, as I have never really been a RATM fan.

Now, on the bottom end of things, I’m really disappointed in one CD I’ve heard this week. I wasn’t ever really a fan of Guns N Roses, though I think I did have all their albums; it was basically a requirement where I grew up. I did like the EP GNR Lies, but the others are mostly forgotten, but they were alright at the time.

Chinese Democracy is garbage. This is the kind of effort that a band of 20 year old amateurs would record. It’s all over the place, it’s soft, it’s ineffectual, and it lacks any sort of feeling. I think that Axl really needs to either go back to the pipe or get off it; because whatever stage he’s at in his addiction, it isn’t helping his music. A new band with a year of total experience between 5 members should be embarrassed to present this album to a label, let alone a band of alleged professionals.

This is an album that suffers from too many cooks; there’s no consistency in style, in form, or in sound. I don’t think that there’s a consistent band line up for more than two tracks, and it really shows. I think this one gets deleted from the iPod and removed from the chance of shuffling up randomly in the future.

This is the kind of magnum opus it takes fifteen years to put together? Somehow, it sounds like it was thrown together over the course of a weekend in order to meet a deadline, using random session musicians and a common vocalist who phoned it in.