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Track Listing

  1. Right Next Door To Hell
  2. Dust N' Bones
  3. Live And Let Die
  4. Don't Cry (Original)
  5. Perfect Crime
  6. You Ain't The First
  7. Bad Obsession
  8. Back Off Bitch
  9. Double Talkin' Jive
  10. November Rain
  11. The Garden
  12. Garden of Eden
  13. Don't Damn Me
  14. Bad Apples
  15. Dead Horse
  16. Coma

 

    

Review

While the concept of the difficult second album is hardly original, Guns N Roses seemed to have taken the tired old cliché and milked it for all it was worth. A seemingly endless four years separated the release of their multi million selling debut album Appetite For Destruction and it's eventual full length (and more) follow up, the two part Use Your Illusion. The intervening years had forged a different Guns N' Roses from the lean, hungry monsters from the streets who decimated the opposition with their debut record. Time, money and fame, and with it all the resultant trappings, had all taken their toll and the band's attitude was somewhat different   in 1991 than that back in 1987, the rampant egos and excesses of superstardom were beginning to make their mark on relationships within the band and the public at large.

And yet Use Your Illusion 1 contains many of the features that made Guns N' Roses the only real supergroup on the planet at the beginning of the '90's. Traditional hard rock tracks such as Right Next Door To Hell and Back Off Bitch were now sat side by side with Axl's growing penchant for rock epics, Illusion 1 containing the best examples of which, the definitive sprawling power ballad, November Rain, and Coma, a trawl through Axl's psyche and one of the band's most vastly undervalued masterpieces. The influence of Izzy Stradlin's songwriting is especially prevalent on Illusion 1,  with tracks such as Double Talkin' Jive and Don't Cry highlighting Izzy's integral role in the machinery of the band. Here was no hired gun rhythm guitarist, a talented singer and songwriter in his own right, he was al too often overlooked by the media and fans in favour of the up front duo of Axl and Slash.

Technically and musically a great album, there is however something missing from raising it to the levels of Appetite For Destruction. Maybe the rise to fame had eliminated some of the spark for the heavier rocking tunes, which wasn't entirely made up for by the more delicate arrangements and delivery of November Rain and Don't Cry. An album of varying quality all considered, November Rain and Coma for example are timeless classics which brought GNR's songwriting to an all new level. Sadly songs such as You Ain't The First and Bad Apple are tracks which more careful editing could have been eliminated, although with spiralling egos and an increasing propensity for the pretentious, the Guns N' Roses of 1991 were seemingly less concerned with careful quality control and more with delivering greater quantities of their art to an eagerly expectant public.

Review by Alan Hylands

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The "difficult second album" is one of the perennial rock & roll clichés, but few second albums ever were as difficult as Use Your Illusion, Pts. I & II. Not really conceived as a double album, but impossible to separate as individual works, Use Your Illusion is a shining example of a suddenly-successful band getting it all wrong and letting their ambitions run wild. Taking nearly three years to complete, the recording of the album was clearly difficult, and tensions between Slash, Izzy Stradlin and Axl Rose are evident from the start. The two guitarists, particularly Stradlin, are trying to keep the group closer to their hard-rock roots, but Axl has pretentions of being Queen and Elton John, which is particularly odd for a notoriously homophobic Midwestern boy.

Conceivably, the two aspirations could have been divided between the two records, but instead they are just thrown into the blender; it's just a coincidence that part 1  is a harder-rocking record than 2. Stradlin has a stronger presence on 1, contributing three of the best songs "Dust N' Bones," "You Ain't the First" and "Double Talkin' Jive"  which help keep the album in Stonesy, Aerosmith territory. On the whole, the album is stronger than 2, even though there's a fair amount of filler, including a song that takes its title from the Osmonds' biggest hit and a dippy psychedelic collaboration with Alice Cooper. But it also has two ambitious set-pieces, "November Rain" and "Coma," which find Axl fulfilling his ambitions, as well as the ferocious metallic "Perfect Crime" and the original version of the power-ballad "Don't Cry." Still, it can be a chore to find the highlights on the record amid the over-blown production and endless amounts of filler. 

Review from www.allmusic.com

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  ©Copyright Alan Hylands 2001