When Guns N’ Roses hit the world with its unruly Appetite for Destruction back in the late eighties, you didn’t want to mess with them. Theirs was a story of rags-to-stardom kids from L.A., whose raw metal, punk influences all topped with a glam polish howled about a way of life that they practiced as well as preached. “Sex Drugs N’ Rock n’ Roll” fit them like a charm.

But that was then, and this is now. The upbeat eighties aren’t even matched by most of today’s alternative styles of rock (Emo comes to mind, yuck!). The team made up by Axl, Slash, Izzy, Duff and Adler will remain legendary. Except they’ve all moved on now, all except Axl.

This Sunday, on November 23, Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy album is coming out after 13 years in the making. We’ve waited for this one for about as long as Duke Nukem. It features none of the original cast save Axl himself, but the time and money it took to prepare this album must have made it a rock revolution. Is it so?

Well Hinder drummer Cody Hanson, who listened to leaked tracks from Chinese Democracy put it bluntly: "The original Guns N' Roses inspired us — not Axl Rose being an a**hole.”

“We've heard some of the earlier stuff that's leaked, and the single, and I was just kind of like, 'Eh,'” Hinder’s frontman Austin Winkler said. “Axl's voice sounds great, but that was never a problem. It was him going onstage and working with those other guys that was the problem. I think somewhere Axl's got all these other different guitar players he's tried to work with and he was just whipping them, going, 'More like Slash! More like Slash!' That's what I'm picturing in my mind.” He went on to call the album’s sound to be too artsy and overproduced, and missing something, a soul perhaps.

The album features impressive intros with a cappella vocal choirs, sirens, (sometimes gratuitous) movie samples, and music that is polished and tweaked down to each and every last note. Thirteen years of production time have given this album too much technical perfection for its own good, going against the ragged, rebellious one-man-against-the-world Axl is sporting in many of the lyrics. It’s kind of hard to believe that message coming from an album produced by hundreds of musicians.

Although Axl tends to ham it up as much as he can, the track is not without its finer moments such as If the World and what is arguably the best track Shackler’s revenge, in which Axl Rose’s uncontestable vocal talent as well as his and his fellow musicians’ talents as a composer and lyricist.

Chinese Democracy unfortunately far from being a revolution, signals the death throes of an era, especially considering the Guns’ production schedule. And in the end, for all my picking on Axl, it is as Hanson put it, “great to hear that voice on the radio again.” The album will be released on Sunday with the CD available exclusively through Best Buy.