Beyond disappointing from them again. I'm with James on this, I think the reason is that they've sold so few copies that they've not even met the initial quota needed to actually make it. It's so telling that there are no pictures of the vinyl anywhere, it clearly hasn't been made.

I'd be lying if I said I was expecting the release to actually happen. It seemed too good to be true and it is. There's no way they're going to release this in December either. The bit they inserted about the orders being automatically cancelled unless you confirm you don't want it to be says it all. They're not releasing it anymore and they want as many as possible to cancel their orders so there are fewer angry people when they do that.

The autistic weirdness the band (Axl) has over actually releasing music is so tiring now. Just get the best version of everything you've done and stick it in a Dropbox folder and don't worry about it anymore, and retire. There is no chance of them actually releasing an album before one of them dies.

And if anyone is hoarding a version of The General that in anyway listenable, or any other songs for that matter, now is the time to release it all. The band deserve it.

Very much feels like it doesn't it. It kind of felt inevitable that something would happen with this. I thought it might be that they'd release it on digital and piss off all the people who had specifically bought it on vinyl just to hear The General. But for so much news from release date delays from a week to two months to 'indefinite' and them not say anything is just classic GNR. No doubt there will be some kind of excuse rolled out in a few weeks about how the plastic needed was held hostage by Greta Thunberg.

If they have messed this up, offer people a refund and release it digitally. People are over the band's incompetence now.

I keep expecting to log on everyday and see a post that it's finally leaked. I've no idea how they've managed to keep it under lock and key for this long. There must be so many copies of it floating about in transit by now to be got ready for packaging and dispatch to the customers? How has one of those not slipped the net? How has a record company exec not been given a sample and left it somewhere?

When it does finally drop, someone send me a PM with the link.

The absolute best thing to do with this mess and the band in general is to put out an album, as quickly as humanly possible titled "Chinese leftovers" with a picture of half eaten Chinese meals on the cover. Just throw out the complete (ish) songs as a numbered album, then put everything (And I mean everything) else there is in a folder on the album and let the fans have at it. Then everyone gets what they want. Buckethead fans get every solo he worked on, Brian May fans get their versions and we can finally hear all the classic tracks like Oklahoma, The General, State of Grace, Soul Monster, Atlas Shrugged, Thyme etc. Any of the actual songs good enough to be played live can be added to the playlist for the never ending tour. This policy of dripping out the old material at such a slow rate is as excrutiating as the process of waiting for the album to be released was in the first place.

The band themselves can them close that chapter and move on, creating a new album that releases within the next 6 months.

And the Chinese material is then permanently deleted so Axl can no longer work on it. We don't need a 2038 remix of Silkworms.

There are quite a few people who claim that over the years. However there are plenty that say the opposite. Sebastian Bach said it had screaming vocals by Axl and the party recording did appear to have vocals.

The bits we've heard of The General were the intro to Chinese Democracy when they played it live. That was a slow, haunting instrumental and lasted a couple of minutes and never really did anything but brood, so it's not hard to imagine it being a 7 minute piece with no lyrics. We've also had Fortus speak about it recently and describe it as 'just a B-side' and not say anything about it at all and then speak about how good a song Perhaps is, which is another sign it's either not a full song as such, or it's not a good one.

But I'm still clinging on to Bach's version of the song and also what Fernando said about Perhaps being a great song, but The General being 'a monster'. If it's a poor song or an instrumental, why release it at all? I'm sure there are some other trash songs from that era, why not leave it as a myth if it's not a piece worthy of the hype?

Hopefully it leaks before the release date anyway. It would keep the tradition of the album going.