Guns N Roses: Ranking Their Albums From Worst To Best

3. Use Your Illusion I

Choosing the better half of the Use Your Illusion double album is entirely up to genre preferences. If you were a bigger fan of Izzy's hard rock core and wanted an album closer to Appetite For Destruction, than Use Your Illusion I is for you. Unfortunately, you're not going to find an album nearly as tight as Appetite, either. Illusion I weaves in and out of their brand of tough, spunky blues (blasting out of the gate with "Right Next Door To Hell" and "Dust N' Bones") while still trying to achieve the grandiosity of Queen and Yes. You can practically hear the band members butting heads, and the resulting album is a constant tug-o-war between their roots and Axl's desire to become hard rock's answer to Elton John. Of course, without this push and pull, there'd be no "November Rain," nor would they ever decided to cover a song like Wings' "Live and Let Die," both of which are still considered among the band's most classic offerings. Then again, this method also provided an album overstuffed with filler. ("Back Off Bitch" is egregious even by GNR's standards, and "The Garden" sounds like an Axl vanity project.) Illusion I certainly doesn't lack for ambition, and even if the scattershot approach doesn't work quite as well in this first half, it still provides ample groove and a slew of amazing individual tracks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SbUC-UaAxE