Punks Jump Up (To Give a Beat Down): Guns N' Roses, 'Chinese Democracy'

IT'S BEEN 17 YEARS since Guns N' Roses' last full album of new songs, but "Chinese Democracy" has finally jumped up just to get beat down.

That W. Axl Rose is a mental case is undeniable. But what is debatable is whether or not we should feel sorry for him. After all, this is a rich mental case, a man capable of receiving the best help psychotherapy and psychopharmaceuticals can offer. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to make due with St. John's Wort and a sun lamp.

And while Rose agonized over the completion of "Chinese Democracy," having the luxury of going down the creative rabbit hole for more than a decade while being sucked ever deeper by the multitude of brain-numbing options modern recording provides, the rest of us have grown older, worked harder and watched our retirement accounts go "poof."

All this is to say that if "Chinese Democracy" came out in the 1970s, it would have been considered cultural class warfare. You know how the punks condemned progressive rock for its bloated everything, its disconnect from everyday tribulations and its prioritization of technique over emotion? That is "Chinese Democracy" in a nuthouse shell.

The songs are stripped of any soul they may have once contained by obsessive tinkering; it's Pro Tools abuse of the highest order. "Chinese Democracy" is more compressed than Axl Rose's plastic-surgery-tightened face, with each note and beat sounding like it's been wrung dry, forced into a tiny space and squeezed out through a narrow tube.

When Rose sings on "Better," "No one ever told me when I was alone / They just thought I'd know better," it sounds like the egomaniac is pointing the finger back at his enablers, Geffen Records and Sanctuary Music, the corporate rubes who footed the multi-million dollar bill for this undemocratic mess. But someone at the label or Rose's management team should have pulled a coup and started leaking the tracks much earlier, perhaps forcing Guns N' Roses' to release "Chinese Democracy" when it might have been even slightly relevant — or at least something approaching a nonevent, as opposed to the circus it is now.

Then again, it's hard to imagine a time when "Chinese Democracy" would ever be relevant, and the album was crafted over too long a period to be considered an opened time capsule. It's more like a ripple in the space-time continuum, where '80s hair ballads ("Street of Dreams," "Catcher in the Rye"), '90s NIN-inspired nu-metal electronica ("Chinese Democracy," "Shackler's Revenge," "Better") and '00s kitchen-sink eclecticism ("Riad N' the Beduoins," "If the World," "There Was a Time") converged into an awful mess of music.

Rose's voice is still a unique instrument, but it's so processed and polished on "Chinese Democracy" that it's impossible to feel the raw power that infused classic G N' R tracks such as "Sweet Child o' Mine," "Welcome to the Jungle," "Patience" and "Yesterdays."

His vocal choices are also bizarre. At the start of each line in the ballad "Street of Dreams," Rose sings an octave lower than his usual range, and it sounds like someone has put a finger on the master tape to produce a sound that recalls that of a drunken lounge singer. Then, Rose affects a random accent on the ballad "Sorry," singing "But I don't want to do it" in something that might be trying to sound like Caribbean English. Meanwhile, his multitracked falsetto screaming on "This I Love" is precisely the sort of combo of sounds that will cause dogs everywhere to commit suicide.

So while it's difficult to have sympathy for Rose's self-imposed torture, there was reason to hope he could overcome his demons and deliver a record that, even if it wasn't great by past G N' R standards, would be a fascinating album to study, a flawed work of art that would encourage repeated spins in order to uncover clues to Axl's misery.

Unfortunately, "Chinese Democracy" is unlistenable.

» Don't believe us? Stream the whole album at MySpace.

» Our bros over at Post Rock have posted a poll: "How long did you last on a first listen to "Chinese Democracy"? Go there now and tell them your own endurance test tale.

Photos by Bru Garcia/AFP/Getty Images (top) and Alexander Sibaja/Getty Images