Let's get some perspective. Guns N Roses spent more time completing the follow-up to 1991's Use Your Illusion I & II than the United States spent fighting the Vietnam war. The amount of poor decision-making: not dissimilar. There have been feuds, lawsuits, firings, rehirings. All the original Gunners were gone over a decade ago. Except, of course, the Botoxed, corn-rowed super villain who scared them all off. And who finished the album in fifteen years, which is five years longer than the span of The Beatles' entire career.

Chinese Democracy's non-existence is so well-known and ingrained, the source of so many jokes, that its actual existence can only be a letdown. That is until you hear it. Then, somewhat astonishingly, 5,475 days, at least $13 million, fourteen studios, twenty or so musicians (including five guitarists and a harpist) seems just about right. Axl has written an epic poem to his own obsessive-compulsive disorder. "If I thought that I was crazy / Well I guess I'd have more fun," he sings on "Catcher N the Rye," a blast of iMax Lynyrd Skynyrd complete with string section, a couple na-na-na refrains, several bridges to nowhere and lord knows how many latticed layers of Axl's bandana-banshee singing.

These aren't songs, they're suites, energetic and skittering and unpredictable hard rock hydras cut with miasmic industrial grind, stadium rattling metal solos, electronic drift and hip-hop churn. Some of it's ludicrous: the symphonic basher "Madagascar" samples bits from Mississippi Burning, Cool Hand Luke, Braveheart, Casualties of War, Seven and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech. Some of it's brilliant: "I.R.S." swaggers and slugs like classic late '80s Guns N Roses. If we had a dime for every time Axl turned to one of his producers and said, "This needs just a little more guitar," we could buy everyone on the planet a lifetime supply of General Tso's chicken. But strip away the mountains of sounds and at heart you get piano ballads, a lonely man locating his pain and resentment. When Guns N Roses debuted with 1987's epochal Appetite For Destruction, Axl was an Indiana hayseed reborn as a snake-dancing messiah. His portraits of the Sunset Strip had an outsider's disdain and desire. By Use Your Illusion, he was situated above Hollywood, in the hills, like a jaundiced Hollywood producer. Twenty years later, the disdain's still there, but the only world he seems to know is his own Michael Jacksonian isolation, which is to say the world of this record and all the strife that's marked its creation. Axl's perfectly turned "you"s have a venomous adolescent contempt, his "they"s drip scattershot paranoia ("you thought they'd make me behave and submit," he spits on "Sorry"). He empathizes primarily with himself, but also with assassins and soldiers.

You can't blame a man for his feelings but it is hard to understand them. In an era when everyone else is constantly marketing their lives - twittering, blogging, hopping in front of camera phones, putting as much of themselves into the world as possible - he's been able to do what he wants, how he wants, on his own time, away from everyone, until it's perfect in his eyes. A lot of people would look at that as freedom. So how come Axl talks like he's been in jail?

DOWNLOAD "Catcher N the Rye," "I.R.S."