JON PARELES

ESSAY


“All I’ve got is precious time,” W. Axl Rose sings in the title song of Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” (Geffen), and he must be well aware of how that line sounds now. Mr. Rose, 46, the only remaining original member of Guns N’ Roses, needed 17 years, more than $13 million (as of 2005) and a battalion of musicians, roducers and advisers to deliver “Chinese Democracy,” the first album of new Guns N’ Roses songs since 1991.

Released on November 23, “Chinese Democracy” is the Titanic of rock albums: the ship, not the movie, although like the film it’s a monumental studio production. It’s outsize, lavish, obsessive, technologically advanced and, all too clearly, the end of an era. It’s also a shipwreck, capsized by pretensions and topheavy production. In its 14 songs there are glimpses of heartfelt ferocity and despair, along with bursts of remarkable musicianship. But they are overwhelmed by countless layers of studio diddling and a tone of curdled self-pity.

“Chinese Democracy” sounds like a loud last gasp from the reign of the indulged pop star: the kind of musician whose blockbuster early success could once assure loyal audiences, bountiful royalties, escalating ambitions and dangerously open-ended deadlines. The new rock paradigm, a throwback to the 1950s and early 1960s, is to record faster, more cheaply and more often.“Chinese Democracy” is such an old-fashioned event that at this point no album could easily live up to the pent-up anticipation and fascination. Over the last two decades Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut album, “Appetite for Destruction,” has sold 18 million copies in the United States alone. The original band, particularly the guitar team of Slash and Izzy Stradlin , collaborated to forge a scrappy combination of glam, punk and metal behind Mr. Rose’s proudly abrasive voice. Singing about sex, drugs, booze and stardom, Mr.Rose was an MTV success story for the 1980s: a self-described abused child from heartland America who got himself out of Indiana and reinvented himself as a volatile Hollywood rock star.

Amid tours, band members’ addictions and liaisons with models, Guns N’ Roses went on to make an EP and the multimillion- selling albums “Use Your Illusion” I and II, which were released simultaneously in 1991. Those were followed by a desultory collection of punk-rock remakes, “The Spaghetti Incident-,” in 1993, before the band splintered and left Mr. Rose as the owner of the Guns N’ Roses brand.

He has been announcing the impending completion of “Chinese Democracy” since at least 1999 and has been singing many of its songs on tour since 2001. Yet year after year, Mr. Rose worked on and reworked the songs.

Like the old Guns N’ Roses albums, “Chinese Democracy” whipsaws between arrogance and pain, moans and sneers. The present-day Mr.
Rose presents himself as someone beleaguered on every front .

“I am crazy,’’ he belts over the frantic guitar and tom toms of “Riad N’ the Bedouins.’’ But the craziness on “Chinese Democracy” isn’t the wild, brawling arrogance that the young Mr.
Rose and his rowdy ‘80s band mates offered.It’s the maniacal attention to detail that’s possible in the era of digital recording .

Sometime during the years of work, theatricality and razzle-dazzle replaced heart. As Mr. Rose bemoans the love that ended or vows to face life uncompromised and on his own, the music on “Chinese Democracy” swells and crashes all around him, frantic and nearly devoid of breathing space.

It’s hard to envision him as the songs do, that besieged antihero alone against the world, when he’s sharing his bunker with a cast of thousands.