[Editor's note: We originally intended to publish a review of Kanye West's new album on Friday of last week. However, as the (arbitrary) deadline drew near, we began to realize that the album deserved more time before judgment could conscientiously be passed. So journalistically, we may be late to this party, but we feel our review is fairer than most- to you, as well as to Mr. West.]

There’s plenty of reason to call Kanye West an asshole; the guy’s as peacockish and egomaniacal as they come, and he makes no apologies about it. The multi-platinum rapper / producer went way beyond comparing himself to the greats in a recent interview, planting the flag on what he considers his place in music history: “I’m doing pretty good as far as geniuses go,” he said. “I’m going down as a legend, whether you like me or not. I am the new Jim Morrison. I am the new Kurt Cobain. They feel like, ‘Yo, he’s got a God complex, because he said if they wrote the Bible again that he would be in it’. Duh, yeah, I would be in it. I feel like I’m one of the more important people in pop culture right now. The Bible had 20, 30, 40, 50 characters in it. You don’t think that I would be one of the characters of today’s modern Bible? And people have their own forms of bibles now. It’s a new day and age…”

Was Chinese Democracy worth the wait? When we got our hands on a bunch of damn-near finished songs in June, we said it was. And we had always suspected it was going to be, for years leading up to that moment, as rumors and rough demos trickled out of whatever mansion / studio / nudie bar Axl Rose was holed up in.

After all this time, all fans east of psychotic had the common sense to at least suspect that the big secret had been built up too much, that if and when the moment of truth finally came, it would likely be an anticlimax. Of course, the most amazing thing about this album is that it’s in our hands.

One of my favorite albums is Sepultura’s revered 1991 opus, Arise. At the time of its release, it was the perfect blend of the thrash metal sound that had pushed heavy metal music into the extreme, and the newly emerging death metal sound that bands like Possessed and Death had worked so hard to champion… a perfect middle-ground. Today, it is a metalhead’s classic and is still considered one of the greatest death / thrash records of all time.

My first encounter with the texan metal outfit As Eden Burns was met with both hope and skepticism. Far too many bands have set out to achieve this coveted middle-ground but never managed to sound natural (at least to these ears) in their musical endeavors.

Is it a good idea to use a band’s Greatest Hits record as an introduction to their body of work? It’s an arguable point, but the b-side and deep-tracks fetishist in me says no. For every Man In The Box, there’s a Right Turn. For every Welcome To The Jungle there’s a Rocket Queen. Where Even Flow and Jeremy ended, Given To Fly and W.M.A. began. And so on. The hits are rarely my favorites.

If there were ever a possible exception to the rule, however, I’d say Stereophonics fit the bill. Pulling from 5 number one albums and 25 top 40 singles, Decade In The Sun is a surprisingly potent sampling of the band’s 12-year history, collectively shining bright enough to finally get the attention of musical ADD sufferers like myself.

The Electric Six show in Los Angeles Friday night was, as expected, a sizzling sex-rock love affair. The band was in top form, rocking in their special Electric way that’s made us such rabid fans here at Antiquiet.

The show was epic, it was awesome, and it lived up to my previous description of them as ’supreme champions of everything unholy and awesome about rock n’ roll.’

But enough about that. The real gem of the evening was my merch-table discovery of a CD called Sexy Trash, a 30-track collection of odds, ends, b-sides and interludes available exclusively at a club near you when Electric Six rolls through on their Hittin’ The Walls And Workin’ The Middle tour. The songs cover the band’s 11-year career, and a brief description of each song from lead singer Dick Valentine is included on the back.