Guns N’ Roses
Use Your Illusion Super Deluxe UME/GEFFEN
If the original 30 tracks weren’t enough for you, here’s a box set that adds 47 contemporaneous live performances.
On 17 September 1991 Guns N’ Roses simultaneously released a pair of double albums, covering a huge range of styles, with writing credits by the four principal members. It was some response to the charge that, in taking four years to properly follow-up their Appetite For Destruction debut, the band were a busted flush.
Appetite had changed the world in 54 minutes. Use Your Illusion I (7/10) and II (8/10) spent more than two and a half hours making it busier – and GN’R grandiose. The Illusion albums are guilty (in places) of misogyny and overindulgence. The 30 songs remain hard to love played end to end. There’s also an elephant in the room: Axl Rose’s voice. It’s an angle grinder that disfigures many fine songs and does horrible things to Wings’ Live And Let Die. But hey, he wrote the epic ballads Don’t Cry and November Rain, and Estranged and Coma – an amazing piece of work – and invited Alice Cooper aboard to make The Garden near-perfect.
‘Super Deluxe’ means a box set that contains the originals remastered, a 100- page book and assorted reproduction ephemera. But it’s the two never-beforereleased complete live sets you’ll treasure – if
