However tenuous Axl Rose’s grip on reality, even he must have realised that the events of March 27, 2008, represented a milestone of sorts. Fourteen years after a long-dissolved line up of Guns N’Roses began work on a new album, Dr Pepper issued a press release pledging to give every American a can of their bakewell tart flavoured carbonated drink if Guns N’Roses got around to finishing Chinese Democracy. Well, you have to hand it to Dr Pepper. Succeeding where even a $1,000,000 hurry-up fee from Geffen in 1999 (with the promise of another million on completion) failed, something in the interim appears to have focused the group’s sole original member. On this basis, it seems that intervention from Tango might be the world’s only hope of getting to hear Kraftwerk’s new stuff.

Anyone looking for clues that may shed light on the gestation of Chinese Democracy would be well advised not to get their hopes up. While distant strings circle around a discourse of plunking ivory and elemental powerchords, the final song Prostitute sees him concede, “It seemed like forever and a day,” before beseeching his audience to “be kind, I’ve done all I should.” If he sounds like a beleaguered soul in search of some sort of peace, the preceding hour of high-octane riffage will ensure that you will at least know how he feels. But, by God, at its best, Chinese Democracy sure has its moments. Few but the most devoted fans must have dared hope for the sort of exhilarating abandon flagged up by the chorus of Shackler’s Revenge or the airless subterranean portent of the title track.

Elsewhere, Chinese Democracy sounds oddly like Kurt Cobain projecting over a noise that recalls Queen at their most rocktastically grandiloquent. It’s a tension most effectively realised on There Was A Time (a song unironically abbreviated to TWAT on fansites), which sees sprightly FM rock verses derailed by a miasmic anti-chorus of abstruse chording. But even here, the smooth string arrangements are an add-on, the royal icing that encases a dense sonic Christmas cake of paranoia and recriminations steeped in Rose’s considerable neuroses.

“You tell them stories they’d rather believe,” he howls on Sorry – a riposte vague enough to fit a girlfriend or bandmate, perhaps his old guitarist Slash, whose recent autobiography detailed the messy circumstances of his departure from Guns N’Roses. Slash was still in the band when Rose first mentioned a new song he had written called This I Love. Fifteen years later, Rose’s overwrought apology to a former lover emerges – and in its way, it’s remarkable, like Marillion’s Kayleigh reimagined by Andrew Lloyd-Webber at his most hysterical. Given another decade, he may have been able to come up with an ending, but here and also on the otherwise excellent Street of Dreams, the song cuts off at a seemingly random juncture.

Perhaps we should simply rejoice that fourteen years of false starts, totaling $13 million have been edited down, seemingly by co-producer Caram Costanzo, to something that mostly coheres as an album. We may never know if Chinese Democracy is the record Axl Rose set out to make in 1994 – before the first of eight guitarists passed through his revolving door – or just an attempt to draw a line under the whole saga and move on. A million monkeys with their million proverbial typewriters would have taken far longer to create something as good as this. The classic Guns N’Roses line-up which gave us Paradise City and Sweet Child O’Mine – would have taken a lot less to deliver something better. So if Chinese Democracy falls somewhere between, that should hardly come as a surprise to anyone.

Polydor

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