That's not to say that everyone who gives this album a real shot will love it, but it is to say that the first few play-throughs are deceiving. Chinese Democracy's core is shrouded in a cloak of small annoyances, and initially, those annoyances are all one hears.

Some of the guitar solos have no business being on a Guns N' Roses record, and Slash would have done better on just about every lead here. Rhe style jumps around a lot, which sometimes hurts the record's cohesion. The lyrics often don't make sense. The occasional mid-'90s industrial sounds should have been cut years ago (why do the intro and verses to "Shackler's Revenge" sound like Rob Zombie, for crying out loud?). The pianos/keyboards too often sound cheesy and fake. Axl Rose had plenty of time, and had spent a reported $13 million by early 2005, so it's easy to be frustrated at the slightest mistake on his part.

But once that cloak comes off and everything seeps in -- the dense arrangements, the piles and piles of guitars, the abrupt shifts in mood, the atypical song structures, the amazingly careful production/mixing/mastering -- it's clear that Chinese Democracy is pretty much everything it could have been. It's as logical a procession from the Use Your Illusion albums as is possible without the original guitarists, bassist, and drummer; it's a collection of awe-inspiring and ambitious songs; and it's an embodiment, however imperfect, of the artist Axl wants to be. The bottom line is that there's a whole lot of musical territory worth exploring on Chinese Democracy.

The title track, notable both for its status as the first single and for its drawing ire from the Chinese government, starts the record off on a fairly simple, hard-rocking note. It's more polished than, say, "It's So Easy," but it's heavier and more direct than even some of the Illusion tracks. Next up is the aforementioned "Shackler's Revenge" which, despite its dated-sounding industrial touches, builds to an arena-ready melodic chorus.

It's then that Rose reveals his true intentions, as the record heads down a road dotted with intricate, highly polished compositions. "Better" is like a trip through hard rock history, covering ground everywhere from Led Zeppelin to '80s shredders to nu metal without any of the transitions seeming abrupt. "Street of Dreams" is the perfect follow-up to "November Rain," with beautiful pianos, orchestral textures, tense vocal melodies, and distorted guitars fitting together perfectly. It's surprising "If the World" works as well as it does, given the odd mash-up of funk bass, understated percussion, guitars of all manners (flamenco, funk wah-wah, downtuned metal), the occasional piano, and Axl's all-out high-pitched wail.

"There Was a Time" is another ballad with a great melody and a heavy chorus, and on higher-quality audio equipment, it's fun to try to hear as many instruments as possible at once: strings, piano, multiple guitars, etc. "Catcher in the Rye" follows "Yesterdays" in that it's a folksier number with a heartland vibe. "Scraped" begins with an interesting a cappella arrangement before morphing into a funk-metal rocker. "Riad N' the Bedouins" captures something close to the original GN'R sound, with good helpings of blues riffs, punk attitude, and metal screaming. "Sorry" is another terrific ballad, "I.R.S." another rocker that changes stylistic gears repeatedly, in ways that seem perfectly natural.

The record loses just the slightest bit of steam as it winds down. "Madagascar" begins with a horn section and a great vocal melody, but devolves into a cluster of recorded speeches, including the very same Cool Hand Luke snippet that introduced "Civil War" ("What we've got here is failure to communicate …"). "This I Love" really ought to be a ballad on par with "Street of Dreams" and "Sorry," but the over-rhymed lyrics make it unintentionally funny: The lines in the first verse alone end in (repeats included) "why," "goodbye," "I," eyes," "wise," "try," "inside," "deny," "die," "mine," "inside," "why," "goodbye," "inside," "light," "bright," "night," "deny." "Try," "lie," and "my" start the next one. "Prostitute" is good, but until the heavy chorus kicks things up a notch, it sounds a bit like Axl was trying to get free advertising from a Gossip Girl episode.

In the end, we'll probably never be able to answer pointless questions like "What was he doing for all that time?" and "Was it worth the wait?" But there's one question we can answer, a very pointed one: "Is Chinese Democracy worth buying, listening to for a few weeks, and coming back to from time to time?" And the answer is, absolutely.