OK, first of all, I hate the n'. If you abbreviate the word "and", ending up with just an "n", you have to write "'n'"; hence, they should be called Guns 'n' Roses. I'll stop about that now.

So, what the hell am I on about this time? Obviously Guns 'n' Roses, but finally, their album called "Chinese Democracy" has leaked onto the Internet, and I've heard it through a friend who forced me to do so. I've since then called the police and had him locked up. Copyright infringement bastard! Just like Lars Ulrich ((Proof is viewable here.)), you should know that Axl needs a gold-plated shark tank bar installed right next to his pool, too!

15 years in the making, recorded in 14 studios, the album is expected to be quite worse for wear. Axl scrapped most of his band, which by the way meant he retracted the genius decision to use the phenomenally talented and fantastic Buckethead as lead guitarist, and I shan't guess how much money's been spent at making this album, but come on! 15 years to make an album? Incredibly stupid. If I were a record company mogul I wouldn't even let Morrissey use that much time to make an album. Well...only if he'd like to.

But what do people think of the album?

The BBC calls it "an uncompromising, fully-focused, hard rock monster ((Culled from this article.))" and writes a by-note on how many people have come and gone while contributing to this project:

The credit list for one song - the Bond theme-esque There Was A Time - runs to 33 lines on the CD booklet. A total of six people play guitar on the track. Two of them get solos.

Jaysis. Another voice, that of Jesse "I-hate-Axl-and-Axl-hates-me-back" Hughes, says "I had so many funny things waiting to be said about it, but the record is good." On the other hand, he sanely says the following ((Culled from this article.)):

As for Axl's pipes, Hughes described the vocals as sounding "suspiciously Zapp-ish," a reference to the '70s soul-and-funk outfit that utilized a talk box on the majority of their recordings. (Jesse apparently didn't know that Zapp founders/brothers Roger and Larry Troutman both died in an apparent murder-suicide in 1999.) "The vocals don't sound real," he said. "It sounds like a MIDI sampler that's approximated to his voice.

True that. It does sound weirdly manipulated, but things have changed since Guns 'n' Roses last released something. For instance, Axl now has stapled-on dreads. Go figure. I'll say this after a first listen: the album is nothing like "Appetite For Destruction", and I'm not saying it should be, but deleting Slash from Guns 'n' Roses would be like removing Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode; like Jesse Hughes, I wonder why Axl still works under the Guns n' Roses-moniker at all. As a whole, this is a cumbersome thing that will not make it into my list of the top 20 albums of the year. Breaking it down to track-level, I'll say that some of the tracks, e.g. "Street of Dreams" are severely time-warped, sounding as dated as their track "Don't Cry" that appeared in one of the "Use Your Illusion" from 1991. "I.R.S." makes me long back to their debut album. Some tracks, e.g. "Shackler's Revenge", are a little adventurous but still quite stale. It's not like Axl has gone out of his way to spend millions of dollars to break new grounds here. Then we have the rock opera stuff which I loathe, e.g. "Madagascar" which makes me miss Manic Street Preachers a lot. Finally, Axl's stealing the title "Catcher In The Rye" just makes me want to punch him.

All in all: not my cup of tea. I love "Appetite", but this will probably just fade away in the end.