Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion I (CD)

All Music Guide

The "difficult second album" is one of the perennial rock roll cliches, 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 I is a harder-rocking record than II. Stradlin has a stronger pre...sence on I, 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 II, 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, "Novermber 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. - Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide Read more Less