Finally,
famous hard rock band Guns N’ Roses’ new album “Chinese Democracy” is slated
for release this Sunday, November 23, putting an end to a seventeen years long
dry spell for the band.
Guns N’
Roses rolled out their last album “Use Your Illusion” volumes 1 and 2
back in 1991, with „Use Your Illusion II” having debuted at no.1 on the Billboard charts at that time,
followed by the album’s first volume at no.2.
Now, after 17 years, frontman and co-founder Axl Rose, lead
guitar player Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal, rhythm and lead guitars player Richard Fortus, bassist Tommy Stinson, piano player Dizzy Reed, keyboardist Chris
Pitman and drummer Frank Ferrer are back in business with „Chinese Democracy.”
Rose is the only original band member in the aforementioned
lineup, all the other ones having joined Guns N’ Roses in 1990 (Reed), 1998 (Stinson and Pitman), 2002 (Fortus) and
2006 (Ferrer and Thal).
When the
hard rock band first formed back in March 1985, it comprised Axl Rose, Tracii
Guns- lead guitar, Izzy Stradlin- rhythm guitar, Ole Beich- bass guitar and Rob
Gardner- drums.
„Chinese Democracy” is Guns N’ Roses’ sixth studio album and also the first of the band’s
studio albums to be released since the 1993 „The Spaghetti Incident?,” which consisted of
only cover versions of punk and glam rock songs of the late 1970s and
early 1980s.
Axl Rose offered „Chinese Democracy” songs for preview to Rolling
Stone magazine as early as 1999, which led everybody to believe that the album
would be released the following year.
Seven years later, Rose announced that the much expected album
would roll out on March 6, 2007, but except for the fact that several tracks
from „Chinese Democracy” leaked on the Internet, nothing else happened neither
in 2006 nor in 2007.
This year, on November 20, the album's 14 tracks were
streamed on the MySpace website, while everybody is now waiting for the official
release on Sunday.