'Chinese Democracy': What the critics say

And they said this day would never come. Axl Rose's magnum opus will be on Best Buy shelves across the nation this Sunday, all right, doubters be damned — and MySpace is doing us one better by streaming the whole thing for free as of right now. (MySpace is also streaming Paul McCartney's new project, which I personally just might be comparably psyched for.) And? Midway through my first listen, Chinese Democracy is sounding pretty cool, but I'm nowhere near close to being able to form a conclusive opinion on such a weighty matter. So I'll turn it over to those critics who've had a little more time to ponder the first original Guns N' Roses album in 17 years. Head over to GNR's MySpace to check out the album if you haven't heard it yet, and speak up: Do you think any of the reviews excerpted after the jump get Chinese Democracy right?

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Verdict: Mixed (B–)
"This is unapologetically huge music, not fit for tiny iPod earbuds. At times it's possible to hear the world-changing CD that Rose — whose banshee howl remains gloriously intact — must have had in his tightly braided skull all these years.... But too often quantity gets in the way of quality: No rock cliché from the last decade goes unrepresented (hip-hop loops, nü-metal skronk), and did 'Madagascar' really need a horn section and Martin Luther King Jr. samples?" —Andy Greenwald

ROLLING STONE
Verdict: Positive (4/5 stars)
"Let's get right to it: The first Guns n' Roses album of new, original songs since the first Bush administration is a great, audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record... If this is the Guns N' Roses that Rose kept hearing in his head all this time, it is obvious why two guitars, bass and drums were never going to be enough." —David Fricke

SPIN
Verdict: Positive (3.5/5 stars)
"An outrageously overblown pop-metal extravaganza, Chinese Democracy feels like a perfect epitaph for all the absurdity and nonsense of the George W. Bush era — one final blowout before Principal Obama takes our idiocy away." —Mikael Wood

THE ONION A/V CLUB
Verdict: Positive (A–)
"Still, I find myself impressed by how close Chinese Democracy comes to fulfilling the absurdly impossible expectation it self-generated, and I not-so-secretly wish this had actually been a triple album. I've maintained a decent living by making easy jokes about Axl Rose for the past 10 years, but what's the final truth? The final truth is this: He makes the best songs. They sound the way I want songs to sound. A few of them seem idiotic at the beginning, but I love the way they end." —Chuck Klosterman

THE TELEGRAPH (UK)
Verdict: Mixed
"How can it ever live up to the legend, or justify its ludicrous gestation period? Needless to say, it can't, but it is a remarkable and often exhilarating album.... Rose sings in many voices — sneering, raging, crowing, opening his battered heart. Yet his presence, beyond question, is phenomenal, unrivalled in contemporary rock." —Andrew Perry

EAGLES OF DEATH METAL'S JESSE HUGHES
Verdict: Mixed
"You can't say it's a bad record — you just can't do it.... The production values had to be probably at the highest level of anything, and you can hear that immediately. There is not a lot of magic going on, in terms of making s--- from nothing. These are real players, and this is the greatest karaoke band ever assembled."

More on Guns N' Roses:
Clark Collis took a close look this fall at the road to Chinese Democracy...
…including a photo timeline of all the stops along the way
GN'R wound up on EW's cover back when Use Your Illusion was their eagerly-anticipated upcoming record
EW reviewed Use Your Illusion I and II when it finally came out in September 1991