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"Whatever way you look at it, 5476 days is a long time to wait for an album. Whether it was madness, ego or just plain laziness that caused Axl Rose to spend 15 years making Chinese Democracy, we&amp;#039;ll probably never know. However, the excitement that&amp;#039;s greeted the album&amp;#039;s sudden arrival after years of cancellations, band rotation and more delays than the District Line at rush hour is a testament to the enduring legacy of the Sunset Strip rockers. The wait may have been ludicrous, the singer may now look barmy, but you can&amp;#039;t ever imagine The Kooks inspiring a soft drinks firm to offer up free beverages for all upon an LP&amp;#039;s release. Whether you think Chinese Democracy is worth the wait will probably depend on what you were expecting. Rose hasn&amp;#039;t re-invented the musical wheel or produced a futuristic space-rock odyssey here. This is a plain and simple Guns N&amp;#039; Roses hard rock record, albeit one that&amp;#039;s been nitpicked over incessantly. Metal, industrial, emo - hell, there&amp;#039;s even a bit of flamenco on &amp;#039;If The World&amp;#039; - have all registered on Axl&amp;#039;s musical radar, but ultimately this is still the same overblown operatic rock the LA band were knocking out in the early nineties. In other words, it&amp;#039;s Use Your Illusion III. The album&amp;#039;s best moments are its most ludicrous: Rose&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;waaaargh&amp;quot; wail on the title track, the bludgeoning riffs on the chorus to &amp;#039;Better&amp;#039; and the Braveheart-sampling breakdown on &amp;#039;Madagascar&amp;#039; are just three of the best. It may not be the reaction Axl was plotting when he holed down in his studio all those years ago, but it&amp;#039;s impossible to hold back a smile when confronted with a record of such deluded pomposity. The &amp;#039;November Rain&amp;#039; moment that is &amp;#039;Street Of Dreams&amp;#039;, which mixes Rose&amp;#039;s idiosyncratic wailing (&amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know what I should do, everywhere I go I see you&amp;quot;), ivory-tinkling and a dozen noodling guitar solos is pure eighties hair-rock panto. Stupid? Yes! Will you have it on repeat all day? Of course! Somewhat inevitably, there are moments when Rose&amp;#039;s stubborn desire to prove he can turn his hand to anything makes the album come unstuck. Wacky breakdowns, corny key changes, several kitchen sinks and a seemingly endless ream of solos are the norm here. Equally, his self-absorbed lyrical paranoia (&amp;quot;You like to think in some way, that it&amp;#039;s me and not you, but we know that isn&amp;#039;t true,&amp;quot; he warbles on &amp;#039;Sorry&amp;#039;) grates across 14 tracks.  Chinese Democracy is pretty much exactly what you&amp;#039;d expect from an aging rocker locked up in LA, a man with a KFC bucket on his bonce and about 758 other session musicians. It&amp;#039;s endlessly silly, utterly withdrawn from reality and of course it doesn&amp;#039;t really warrant the stupendous wait. However, in a musical landscape filled with pretty say-nothing popstars and identikit indie bores, it&amp;#039;s hard to see the return of the Gun N&amp;#039; Roses rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll circus as anything other than a breath of fresh air.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/music/album-reviews/review/a137005/guns-n-roses-chinese-democracy/>