The chorus of the first song, ‘Chinese Democracy’, on the new Guns N’ Roses album, Chinese Democracy, contains the lyric, “All I got is precious time”.  Axl Rose, tragically unable to pronounce a hard ‘i’, pronounces it ‘tayyyyyme’, but we get the point:  If the 17-year delay wasn’t enough to remind us that Axl can do whatever the fuck he wants, he took the liberty of peppering the record with thinly veiled references to the very delay that made everyone think he's crazy.  Like it or not, Chinese Democracy is an album that can’t be evaluated without considering the outlandish circumstances of its release.

Q: Fine then, why the delay?
A: Axl wouldn’t release it specifically because you wanted him to.

This is what Axl Rose apologists will tell you, insisting that it was a grand expression of obdurate creative control.  The album carries enough strength and confidence to suggest Axl could have released ten comparably good albums in the same span.  With surprisingly good guitar work and vintage Guns ballads like ‘Street of Dreams’ and ‘Catcher in the Rye’, Chinese Democracy’s bright spots hold up to the best of the Use Your Illusion records.  And bangers like ‘I.R.S.’ and the title track unleash enough ball-rattling noise to make us wish the album came out fifteen years prior, when we still remembered what Guns N’ Roses sounded like.  

That’s the problem with Chinese Democracy: while Axl tried to force immortality on the record by ripping it completely from its context, he lost the connection that made people give a shit about Guns in the first place.  This is most noticeable on songs like ‘Madagascar’ (which features the same Cool Hand Luke sample that opens ‘Civil War’ – “What we have here is a failure to communicate”), the big, sweeping ones that are meant to feel vaguely important (see: ‘Estranged’, ‘Yesterdays’) and now ring hollow.  This is partly because Axl has come undone with excessive metaphor, but mostly because I stopped caring.  He waited for me to lose interest so he could try to impress me all over again.

Q: Whoah, take it easy.  What if he’s just nuts?

Good point.  This is the more popular position, and perhaps the most logical.  Chinese Democracy sounds like a G N’ R record in a job interview.  Those who pan it call it scattered, though “trying too hard”, while painfully condescending, is probably more appropriate.  Axl covers his bases, and then some, on Democracy’s 14 tracks.  We get the grinding, ‘Get In The Ring’-style driving drums on ‘Shackler’s Revenge’, and the drippy mush of ‘Don’t Cry’ on ‘This I Love’.  We get the 'whaaaaYAYAYAYA' Axl and the 'talk-through-my-lyrics-like-a-hard-rockin’-L.A.-white-guy' Axl.  But we also, unfortunately, get super-whiny, feel-sorry-for-me Axl on songs like ‘Sorry’ and irritating, barber-shop-quartetish harmonies and jarring tone changes on ‘Scraped’.  It sounds like he had too much time to think about it, which I assume is because he did.

Whether Chinese Democracy is a calculated opus or a statement on Axl’s mental well-being, the result is the same: a pretty solid G N’ R album that feels like it was stuck in labour for two decades.  It’s either a crazy album by a good artist or a good album by a crazy artist.  After 17 years, the difference doesn’t really matter.

6.5/10

Chinese Democracy goes on sale November 23rd