The "difficult second album" is one of the perennial rock & roll clichés, but few second albums ever were as difficult as Use Your Illusion. 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 its 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 its hard rock roots, but
Rose has pretensions 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
Use Your Illusion I is a harder-rocking record than
II.
Stradlin has a stronger presence 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 dippy psychedelic collaboration with
Alice Cooper and a song that takes its title from
the Osmonds' biggest hit. But it also has two ambitious set pieces, "November Rain" and "Coma," which find
Rose 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 overblown production and endless amounts of filler. [
UYI I was also released on LP.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine