GUNS N' ROSES — Use Your Illusion II (review)

GUNS N' ROSES — Use Your Illusion II album cover Album · 1991 · Hard Rock Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Pekka
Part 2 of the "We're the biggest rock band in the world, we can do what we want" album of Guns N' Roses. Usually when a band decides to split the overpouring material onto two albums, the first one gets the gems and the less than stellar material is saved for the second release, but this time things are different.

Steven Adler managed to record only one drum track for the entire double album before being kicked out for excessive drug usage, and legend says that that one track was glued together from 60 different takes. What that track was used for, though, might just be the finest GnR song ever recorded: Civil War, an atmospheric, heavy ballad mainly about power and greed. Another epic ballad that belongs among the finest tunes of the album is Estranged, penned by Axl Rose but owing much of its greatness, as the liner notes of the album say, to Slash's "killer guitar melodies".

More rocking highlights mainly include the bondage anthem Pretty Tied Up, the epic powerhouse called Locomotive and the brilliant You Could Be Mine. The style and feel of the album is very much similar to Illusion I, only the highlights are higher and the "filler" tracks fuller. The only real let down is the end of the album, with a redundantly re-lyricized Don't Cry and the hideous electronica experiment My World, which Axl wrote and recorded while "on mushrooms" and Slash apparently became aware of when he was listening to the finished album for the first time.

This album with its counterpart shows that GnR had ambition way beyond the basic riff rock format. Sometimes they pull it off wonderfully, sometimes less. On this album most of the time wonderfully.
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