10 HYPED Albums That Didn't Live Up To Their High Expectations

For the amount of time that Guns N Roses fans waited, there was pretty much no way that Chinese Democracy was going to live up to the hype that it got. In the process of recording the album over a decades' worth of time, Axl Rose had lost every single member of the original Guns lineup and had hired an entire new cast of musicians behind him with the GNR brand slapped on it. Given the hype, this album would have had to solve world hunger to meet all its accolades, and what we got just sounded tired.

Make no mistake, Chinese Democracy does indeed sound like it had been worked on for a long time, but not necessarily in a good way. Being one of the most expensive rock albums ever put to tape, the Axl that turns up on this record is a much different person from Appetite for Destruction, featuring vocals that seem to be recorded during completely different decades. That's not the main problem here though...the main problem is the cast.

While none of these musicians are bad by any stretch, having a different guitarist on almost every single song breaks up the flow of the project, with Bumblefoot and Buckethead trading licks that glaze over your ears the more you hear them. For all that time that was spent fine tuning this project, Chinese Democracy feels a lot more like good ideas than actual songs.