Blessedly short and with the promise of honesty, Guns n’ Roses has a chance to make good on the moments of interest heard on their debut. Appetite for Destruction is excellent if there’s a gas leak in your home and you need to shake the nitrous oxide out of your brain. Axl Rose has an excellent voice, and that’s all there is to the band. It was enough to cement their legacy, and they’re lucky their first album was such a success. Appetite for Destruction may be a weightless, messy, and dated rock and roll album, but it has an influence which remains. The same cannot be said for the albums that followed, with G N’ R Lies a fairly standard piece of work. A disappointing follow-up to those hits which featured on the first album. At least this is more palatable than what was to follow. Short, solid, but all too similar to Appetite for Destruction.
That symmetry begins to unravel Guns n’ Roses. They don’t do rock and roll all that well, the lack of depth to their work and the constant, underwhelming guitar work from Slash is thrown into the spotlight once more. What feels like leftovers from Appetite for Destruction makes up an album which even follows the same tropes of the first. The G side and R side return, as though the contrast between peace and war found in their name had longevity beyond one album. A constant problem for G N’ R lies is how noisy it sounds. Not because of the mixing or the instrumental detail but because it feels like a cluster of sound, a blast of noise that could be catchy if it weren’t for the complete lack of meaning behind it. Cobbling together a previously released live EP and a handful of acoustic songs is a bit of a short-change experience.
G N’ R Lies exposes the shock value that the band relies on, even today. One in a Million is the obvious example but even then, songs like Mama Kin call on people to live out their fantasies which, for Rose, is just smoking and sleeping. There is a lackadaisical manner to his performance, a misery which verges on hedonism but never has the brass to go that far. Instead, it’s the usual run of socially aware problems which plague the album tracks of the first record. Words have meaning, but for Guns N’ Roses, they’re just placeholders in nonsensical offerings on drugs and drink. Swapping out the rock and roll fixtures for acoustic tracks on the second half of the album is proof enough of this. Whistling away on Patience brings about a softer touch, a faux nicety to a barebones love song.
Incredibly, this is about as good as it gets for the band. Acoustic beauties are easy to craft when you have a vocal style that can bring on a faux sincerity. A lot more palatable than what was to come but even then, G N’ R Lies has tricky moments that sink what little goodwill can be afforded to the band. Instrumentally underwhelming at the best of times and, ultimately, sounding like a jam session which never needed to be heard by the public. Still, the live compilation gives us a read on the band and their popularity. We can hear the screams and cheers of a crowd moved by rock and roll. A shame about the latter half of the album, then, because that’s where you hear what the audience is moved by, and none of it sounds all that exciting or relevant now.
