söndag 25 Jan 2009, 2:24

Guns N' Roses / Estranged / Use Your Illusion II (11) / Sep 1991

sablespecter's Album of the Year for 1991
Use Your Illusion I: 62.5% RDF
Use Your Illusion II: 71.4% RDF
combined: 66.7% RDF

A tie, but not exactly. It's just the way I choose to handle the fact that I never consider these two albums apart from one another even though they're not a true double album. But I bought them that way, listened to them that way during th entire autumn of 1991, and they're inextricably linked. The followup distillation Use Your Illusion album doesn't get it near enough correct either.

I judge them on their combined RDF, but I provide the separate RDF for each so you can see how I score them in terms of quantity of tracks. That tells you I like an equivalent of 10 from each (actually 10 from I and 9+2 pink dots from II)* So II scores a higher RDF by virtue that it only has 14 total, but I also like it better qualitatively. There are five infrared dots on II and three from I, and I just like II better overall. Perhaps that's because I is made up of remade pre-Appetite leftovers? I think really it's more because II seems to have a darker mood to it, while I seems to be done with more of just a direct kiss-off mood. For whatever reason, fans apparently agreed, sending UYI-II to #1 and I to #2. These two albums got me through the stress of some pretty dicey days my senior year, and they still serve as a release valve to this day.

While Metallica's black album had a month's head start on these, and I was anticipating it all summer, UYI came to dominate my playlist through the autumn and into 1992. And while there are many tours that I wished I could have been old enough or had the opportunity to attend (say, Led Zeppelin 1977), the Use Your Illusion Tour is the one tour that I could have attended** had I decided to do so, but didn't and have been kicking myself for ever since.

You'll see that the combined RDF is equal to Metallica's second place effort, and both the UYI albums and the black album score a lower RDF than the other two that round out the Top 5. This is one of those instances where infrared dots, enthusiasm when new, and total lifetime plays trump just the direct calculated RDF.

——–
Rounding out the Top Five of 1991 (in order of preference, which happens to be ascending order of RDF):

Metallica: Metallica (66.7% RDF)
Like a lot of people, I thought this turned out to be a great rock album, but that's not what I wanted. First single Enter Sandman tipped us off that this was probably not going to be another great thrash metal album, and I can remember the deflated first listen. A decidedly mixed moment: liked a lot of the songs objectively, but not as Metallica songs. This one took awhile to grow on me, unlike UYI which I liked immediately. But relativity can do a lot for an album within the context of an entire catalog. This sounded a lot better five and six years later in comparison to the two albums that followed it, and like a bona fide classic by the time St. Anger came out. However, in my rankings, it's now lost its position as "best album since Justice" in comparison to Death Magnetic. I still skip or change the channel every time I hear "Enter Sandman."

Pearl Jam: Ten (81.8% RDF)
Confession: I bought it because everybody else was buying it! And took a lot of heat from fellow metalheads for having it. But on its own merits, I think it's their best work (though I haven't listened to the two most recent albums) and IMHO it's also easily the best grunge album ever. I liked less of it at the time than I do now, and it has slowly risen in my playlist over the years.

ØCorrosion of Conformity: Blind (84.6% RDF)
Way late to this album, even after I began listening to COC. Perhaps because it's a transition album: enter Pepper Keenan and the beginnings of their change from punk/thrash crossover to stoner metal. As such, it's an interesting mix. I should actually say "blend" because when you know that this was an album of transition from crossover punk to toner metal, you can actually hear a blending of the two, especially on those first three songs…killer. Keenan is one of my three favorite all-time vocalists and things got even better once he took over full lead vocal duties starting with the next album.

Honorable Mentions (in roughly alphabetical order by band/artist name):
Armored Saint: Symbol of Salvation***
Garth Brooks: Ropin' The Wind****
ØEntombed: Clandestine
Motörhead: 1916
Nirvana: Nevermind
Ozzy Osbourne: No More Tears
Sepultura: Arise
Skid Row: Slave To The Grind
Tesla: Psychotic Supper
U2: Achtung Baby

Is your favorite album from 1991 on this list? Are there any others you would add?

\m/ (ò_ó) \m/

Ø: For the 1990s AotY Awards, albums which were discovered after the 1990s have been noted with an "Ø" This provides a perspective on how much thinner the album lists were at the time.

*Technicality: In my recent review for Chinese Democracy I stated, " scored a higher RDF than the UYI albums, either combined or separately." That is an incorrect statement. I should have checked my work a bit closely when writing that review. I was thinking of nine songs on UYI-II with red dots but did not take into account the two songs which receive pink dots, which together count as one more. So in terms of the RDF, UYI-II scores an equivalent 10/16, and equals the 71.4% score of Chinese Democracy.

**My best options were the sixth, seventh, and eighth shows of the tour: Toledo on 02 Jun 1991, and the two Cleveland dates (actually the now-defunct Richfield Coliseum) on June 4-5th. I elected not to go because these were the week right before finals of my college junior year, and I was unfortunate enough to have every final except the easy one scheduled for Monday! Though I had blown off school before for lesser shows, my junior year of engineering was the year I was finally forced to knuckle down…dammit.

***Since Blind wasn't discovered until after the 1990s, had I assigned the awards at the conclusion of 1991, Symbol of Salvaion would have slipped into the fifth slot with a 69.2% RDF. It's my favorite Armored Saint album and continues to get a lot of plays today.

****Fun fact: Ropin' the Wind was the #1 album for a single week between the four weeks that Metallica topped the charts and in turn being knocked off by Use Your Illusion II for two weeks, before it returned to knock off UYI-II and run at the top for another seven weeks.