He reminds me of Bon Scott. I really like his tunes on his band's myspace. I think he would be a good choice, but I am definitely taking it with a grain of salt.

I completely agree with you D. I think Contraband is a good rock album with a lot of catchy tunes that stick in my head. I also think Libertad is criminally underrated. Neither of these albums live up to the original GNR and they aren't mindblowing, but they are solid albums nonetheless, IMO. I don't get the hate for them. I don't think they are any worse than CD that's for sure.  I enjoy all of VR's ballads way more than the ballads on CD. Scott is an inferior vocalist and lyricist to Axl, but I like the simplicity of VR's ballads more than the over the top and sometimes corny CD ballads. I also think Slash has much more feel and emotion on these songs which elevate them unlike the guitarists on the CD ballads.

I thought the new Killers would be a disaster, but I really like it. It's probably their weakest album, but still a fairly solid effort.

Philadelphia Inquirer's review:

Axl Rose delivers, after 17 years
By Dan DeLuca

Inquirer Music Critic

At long last, Chinese Democracy has arrived. And on behalf of procrastinators everywhere, I'd like to offer hearty congratulations to Axl Rose for finally completing his magnum opus.
After all, why do today what you put off for 17 years? That's how long it's been since Guns N' Roses put out an album of original music. It was 1991 when the savage Los Angeles hard-rock band, in a characteristic act of hubris, released two, with Use Your Illusion I and II.

But is that really so long to wait? Sure, Michelangelo knocked out the Sistine Chapel ceiling in four years, but the dude got to lie flat on his back the whole time. Axl, like Atlas, has had to carry the weight of an ever-changing world on his shoulders for nearly two decades.

And he's still managed to unleash the 14-song, 71-minute, shockingly good Chinese Democracy (Black Frog ***½), which goes on sale today exclusively at Best Buy, in just the same amount of time it took James Joyce to write Finnegan's Wake.

Along the way, Rose has been written off as a petulant, tantrum-throwing monomaniac, not to mention an obsessively neurotic tinkerer who, at last count, had spent more than $13 million on an album that even ardent GN'R fans had given up on ever hearing.

It's turned out, however, that the red-headed, hip-shimmying, now 46-year-old Rose is a genius when it comes to at least one thing: expectation management.

All the other key GN'R members are long gone from the band, including onstage foil Slash, bass player Duff McKagan, and crucially, guitarist Izzy Stradlin, the band's best songwriter.

"Oh My God," Axl's only GN'R music to come out in the interim (on the soundtrack to the 1999 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie End Of Days) was a dismal, dull disappointment. New GN'R gigs often proved to be debacles, like the 2002 show at the Wachovia Center that never happened because Axl stayed in his New York hotel room, instigating a near-riot. And the dense, deep-voiced Chinese teaser "Shackler's Revenge," released in September on the video game Rock Band, hardly seemed buzz-worthy.

So it stood to reason that if Chinese Democracy ever came out, it was bound to be a bloated, Heaven's Gate of a letdown, a would-be masterpiece weighed down by self-importance, woefully out of step with times that have long since passed him by.

But with expectations thus diminished, Chinese Democracy turns out to be the surprise of a season that's already seen comeback albums by hard-rock acts Metallica and AC/DC.

It doesn't suck, after all. And while it's proudly excessive and unquestionably epic, with as many as five multi-tracked guitarists in Robin Finck, Paul Tobias, Richard Fortus, Buckethead and Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal filling in for Slash and Stradlin, the album only occasionally comes off as gratuitously indulgent.

Chinese Democracy - which Rose is said to have named after seeing Martin Scorsese's Kundun in 1997, and has been streaming at the band's MySpace site since Thursday - avoids going down a dark, techno-industrial alley that many GN'R fans feared with the presence of Nine Inch Nails' Finck.

It doesn't sound hopelessly stuck in the early '90s, either. Jittery beats and Spanish guitar underpin the apocalyptic "If the World," and metal machine-gun riffage fires up "Scraped," with Rose screeching, "Don't try to stop us now / I just won't let you."

Almost every song takes its time ebbing and flowing to near-orchestral crescendos. Six tracks, including the stately "Catcher in the Rye," seemingly a nod to fellow recluse J.D. Salinger, stretch to more than five minutes.

Many seem to be about the album itself. "All I got is precious time," Rose sings wryly in the title cut. In a scratchy voice that shows its age, he allows, "I can't find my way back any more," in "Madagascar," a song that samples both the Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke (a Rose favorite) and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.

The latter song, along with the Elton John-ish "Street of Dreams" (previously known as "The Blues"), has been performed for years by the new version of GN'R, which seems to include Illusion-era pianist Dizzy Reed, bassist Tommy Stinson, drummer Frank Ferrer, and multi-instrumentalist Chris Pitman, along with guitarists Fortus and Thal.

Maybe it's because Rose wrote these songs - and, for all we know, recorded his vocals - years ago, but Chinese Democracy is not heavy with portent and solemn middle-age regret. Rose may not look the same as he did back in his "November Rain" days, but he still sounds feisty and spirited, blaming the world for his troubles. "I'm sorry for you," he sings on "Sorry." "Not sorry for me."

Since Use Your Illusion, grunge has come and gone, and rappers have filled the roles that used to be played by self-aggrandizing rock stars. GN'R cover bands abound, and even the likes of Carrie Underwood and Sheryl Crow have been known to dip into the band's songbook in search of un-ironic rock-and-roll swagger.

There's some question as to how much appetite there is for Chinese Democracy among a downloading crowd that was barely alive when GN'R last weighed in. Should they choose to give old man Axl a chance, however, they'll find that the long-missing rocker has more left to offer than anyone could have reasonably expected.

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainm … years.html