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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best, 19 Dec 2006
I'd give this album twenty stars if I could, it's that important to me.
With the ubiquity of music TV these days, it's actually quite hard to remember that heavy metal was hard to get a hold of in the late 80s. Pop and dance ruled the airwaves, you only had TOTP, The Chart Show and The Tube (I hadn't heard of Later, or The Old Grey Whistle Test; was but a nipper in those days). I hadn't even heard of MTV - that was an American thing. But one day a music shop opened in my little hometown, which showed MTV, and that's where I first heard and saw "Paradise City" and "Sweet Child O' Mine". A real epiphany; nothing was the same for me ever again, after getting in in 1988 for my 9th birthday. (The only real comparison has been hearing The Beatles' 67-70 album, and "Smell Like Teen Spirit"). I'm 27 now and have never ever tired of it.
GN'R might have lived the life, but musically they knew exactly what they were doing; they knew their musical history, and had a breadth of taste which "Appetite" only hinted at. Their forebears were, as they well knew, were Aerosmith, so much so that they explored Aerosmith's own influences, so that they are far more than 'Smith ripoffs, even on their first album.
GN'R were melded together in the deperate struggle for recognition and success that was the LA rock scene. Then dominated by Motley Crue and lesser bands like WASP and Ratt, GN'R came along and blew them away. Where Motley Crue had acheived success by having a crossover appeal (covering "Helter Skelter", a Beatles song, even on their heaviest album, "Shout At The Devil"), GN'R did it by tapping into an older, heavier tradition. They weren't pop-rock, they were hard-rock - much more visceral, with punk-rock's attitude, rock music's musicanship and with a live show of extraordinary magnetism.
"Appetite" is their purest statement. "Paradise City" is a metaphor for their ambition to be the biggest band in the world - "Take me down to the paradise city". "Sweet Child O' Mine" might have been their crossover moment, but rather than being a schmaltzy soft-rock anthem (as Poison etc had managed), it's a yearning, tender opener which modulates to a storming finale, with I think the most hair-raising guitar solo eve recorded. "It's So Easy" is the ultimate expression of young-man arrogance and testosterone, with Axl singing at the bottom of his range and the riff exploding out at you like a Molotov Cocktail of belligerent intent. "Nightrain", a song about a cheap tonic wine (like Buckfast) tells you about their days - "Said I'm a mean machine, been drinking gasoline and honey you can make my motor hum". "Rocket Queen" is a superb closer, starting with a brilliantly sleazy riff (and supposedly verite sounds in the middle), but ending on a storming, rousing, optimistic closer.
Axl sings brilliantly throughout, Slash's solos are magnificent, Duff's bass sounds much better than on "Use Your Illusion" - but the songs are never dominated by one band-member as they are on UYI. It's always a coherent, band album. It's the greatest metal album I know, and I've been into metal ever since I got this album.
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