Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion II
Featured Album
More of an odds-and-sods collection than its companion
Use Your Illusion II feels like more of an odds-and-sods collection than its companion album, thanks in part to the inclusion of tracks originally released elsewhere. The overwrought cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" and the album-opening protest-song tribute "Civil War" had both been released in 1990; the spitfire put-down "You Could Be Mine" was more associated with the 1991 blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Even the version of "Don't Cry" on this album was the alternate version, relegated to stunt showings on MTV.
But there are still a few solid tracks to be found among the detritus — indeed, there are more than enough to make a GNR completist want to cherry-pick the best bits from the two Illusion albums and combine a single killer set. Chief among those tracks is "Pretty Tied Up," a sinewy track that marries sadomasochistic metaphors with a cautionary tale about the record industry and that has one of the best basslines on the album (it's probably second only to the pulsing beat that propels "You Could Be Mine"). "So Fine" — dedicated to the New York Dolls' Johnny Thunders, who passed away in 1991 — has Duff McKagan assuming lead-vocal duties, and his cracked pipes serve the song's mournful adulation well. And the breakup mini-epic "Locomotive" is full of hatred directed at both the self and a spurned lover, with a coda, over which Axl Rose moans while a piano vamps and Slash plays a searing blues solo, that might be one of the best points on the whole Illusion collection.
There's even a bit of foreshadowing as far as where rock music will go in the ensuing years. "Get In The Ring," Rose's naming-names ode to all the magazine editors and other evildoers who have wronged him, now seems like a precursor to the Twitter age, where musicians can take on those who they feel have unfairly quaffed a bit too much haterade. And the album-closing "My World," an electronic romp through a paranoid landscape over which Rose's distorted voice rants about being in a "socio-psychotic state of bliss," is in hindsight a fairly obvious harbinger of the artistic direction he'd take (for better or worse) on the long-incubating Chinese Democracy.
