I had a whole in-depth track-by-track review of the album written, but I scrapped it. When an album takes as long as this one, and gets talked about and over-analyzed as much as this one, it’s hard to get a clear perspective. The only way this album should be judged is by the sound it makes when you play it. Forget the years it took, the millions of dollars, the huge list of musicians come and gone, and the fact that Axl is the only original member of the band. Leave all that behind and listen to it for what it is; a Rock record.

Luckily for us, it happens to be a very good Rock record. Among many other things, detractors of this album (haters) will call it “overproduced”. I would call it “noticeably produced”. There is extreme attention to detail, and the album sounds great. It sounds like an album by one of the biggest bands in the history of music, not a garage band. It doesn’t have a single bit of that disgusting retro vibe that so many bands are trying to pull off these days, and it doesn’t suffer from the blatant overmastering that Death Magnetic or the newest Coheed and Cambria album suffer from, and thank god. I was really concerned that it would.

One of the most surprising things to me was just how different so many of the tracks were from one another. You get through at least the first five tracks, each with significantly distinct flavors. Right now my favorites are “Better”, “If The World”, “Scraped”, and “Sorry”. There are a couple that could be compared to Use Your Illusion era GnR, but for the most part these songs are a giant leap ahead for Axl and his new bandmates.

And if the comparison even needs to be made, this album kills anything Velvet Revolver has done.

If you wanna download it before buying it, here you go.