Who killed Mary? That’s the takeaway on probably the finest concept album ever created by a prog-metal band. Before Queensryche’s third album, the band already had an impressive collection of unique metal material, but Operation: Mindcrime not only progressed their sound and voice, but added the element of a timely and complex plot that tied together the 15 tracks on this epic album.

The album tells this story, in a nutshell: It starts with a guy in a hospital bed, who is piecing together everything that happened to him recently. His name’s Nikki, and he’s sedated and in some type of prison/insane asylum, and a TV news broadcast about his crime snaps him back to the beginning. He was a junkie in New York City (this was the pre-Disnified NYC, I guess – he wasn’t a hipster doofus heroin addict in Williamsburg or anything) and he got pulled into this secret society planning a revolution, run by a guy named Doctor X. This X guy uses the heroin’s influence to train Nikki ala The Manchurian Candidate to kill people when he calls him on the phone and says “Mindcrime.” Nikki hooks up with Sister Mary, a former whore who is also brainwashed and is now a nun for a guy named Father William, a sort of archetype for all of the bad televangelism going on back in the late 80s. His relationship with Mary starts to snap Nikki out of the mind control funk. Doctor X sees the threat and commands Nikki to kill Mary and the priest. He offs the priest, but can’t kill Mary, and the two of them decide to split from this whole Mindcrime mess. X isn’t cool with this, and Mary ends up killed (this isn’t explained, more in second.) Nikki goes insane, is arrested by the police for the murder of Mary, and hauled off to the padded cell. By the end of the album, he leaves his catatonia and all of this rushes back to him, in a powerful conclusion.

The reason this really works is that it’s a timely message: televangelists ripping off old ladies; politicians ripping off the people; corporations ripping off the government. It’s every late-eighties demon from the Reaganomics era wrapped up in a nice little package. But unlike the metaphorical one-song stories of earlier albums, this one is set in present-day, and directly follows a protagonist. It doesn’t preach like later albums, which is a minor complaint I’ve had about Tate’s lyrics since Mindcrime. It’s the old Creative Writing 101 first lesson (and a song by Rush): show, don’t tell. If you write a song that says “the federal government doesn’t like black people” (“Empire,” sort of), it isn’t interesting. When you pull me through a story of a heroin junkie turned mind control puppet assassin, I get it.

Okay, so who killed Mary? This is left ambiguous, with at least three possibilities: One is that Nikki killed her, while in a trance. Another is that Doctor X or another mindcrime zombie killed her, and Nikki was set up to take the fall. Or, maybe Mary killed herself, either to get out of the futile situation, or because Doctor X commanded her to while she was in a trance. The lyrics of the album don’t make this clear, although (to ruin it for you), on the 2004 tour when the album was played in its entirety, it was made very clear that X called her and told her to shoot herself, and she complied. But for years, this wasn’t clear, and people micro-analyzed the lyrics like people micro-analyze the bible to find quotes that support video games and hybrid cars as being evil. (Check out this for a well-done example of this.) This was further confused by the Video: Mindcrime collection, which people also overanalyzed for clues. I remember following the metal usenet newsgroups back in the early 90s, and there was still an ongoing debate about this well after Empire was released. That drove me batshit at the time, but I have to admit it was somewhat genius to leave this ambiguous, and it’s a minor letdown to actually know the answer now.

(Another story line that is more ambiguous than you might think is whether Nikki and Mary were actually sexually involved, or just pals. For some reason, I always assumed they were, but as the site above mentions, it’s not explicitly mentioned in the lyrics. It’s one of those things like how you can read between the lines in the bible and see whether or not Adam had a wife before Eve. )

Mindcrime‘s sound in general is pretty lofty stuff. Produced by Peter Collins, it’s pretty dynamic, with a lot of power behind it, and ranges from the very mellow (“My Empty Room”) to downright speedy (“The Needle Lies”). The sound isn’t as thick or produced as Rage For Order, but there’s a lot more going on. Add to this the intros and performances that stitch together the album, and you’ve got some pretty impressive recording work. The production would be an order of magnitude better on Empire, but it’s pretty damn good here.

(Aside: the start of the album, in the hospital, has a sample of an announcement that says “Dr. Blair, Dr. Blair; Dr. J. Hamilton, Dr. J. Hamilton.” This is a stock sound effect and has appeared everywhere over the last few decades. I just spotted it last week in an AT&T commercial. I’ve heard it in TV shows, movies, commercials, and it even showed up in an intro in a Motley Crue album, which was pretty stupid to me.)

Another great addition to the album is that of Mary herself, played by Pamela Moore. Moore is a singer also from the Seattle area, who has since flirted with a pop/technica career over the years. For years I heard the rumor that she was Tate’s vocal/opera coach, but I’ve since read the band heard her in a commercial and recruited her for the album. She sings a duet with Tate in the song “Suite Sister Mary”. It clocks in at 10:41 (the entire album is just shy of an hour long) and features a mix of neo-classical elements and latin chanting with rock elements for a slower but very sinister and dramatic number, and Moore’s performance is absolutely spot-on and punches up Tate’s operatic abilities much more than was present in any solo work previous to this.

This album has a lot of personal meaning to me. I remember getting it the day it came out in 1988 and spending an entire weekend listening to it nonstop, trying to find clues. From the first second of the blasting beginning to “Anarchy-X,” I was absolutely hooked. I spent the summer of 1988 listening to this album constantly, and it carried over as a frequent listen well into the summer of 1989, too. (The album took over a year to gain popularity and reach gold status.) In my freshman year, when I started using the VAX mainframe computers, I set my process name to “Doctor X” and kept it that way for the majority of my time in college. For a while, this album seemed dated, and then suddenly, around 2000 or so, all of the lyrics made total sense again. That’s probably why they made a sequel, but it was nowhere near the quality of this masterpiece. As far as concept albums or examples of progressive metal, it does not get any better than this.

Rating: 10

How do you follow up one of the best prog metal concept albums of all time? That was the monumental task in front of Queensryche when they finished touring in support of Operation:Mindcrime and started recording their fourth full release, Empire, in the spring of 1990. Would it be a sequel to the concept album? Would we find out who killed Mary? Would it be an even heavier rocking album? Or would the band to in another direction? Luckily, the band chose the latter, and did an exceptional job of reaching the next level in their musical definition.

Prior to Empire, Queensryche built an identity on top of being this art rock/metal sensation that would appear to be coming out of somewhere in Europe. (They recorded their first full-length album in London.) But Empire is the first point where the band stepped away from that image and got back to their roots as an American band, a group of guys that grew up in a pre-grunge Seattle, a place both high-tech and working class, removed from the California metal scene and on opposite shores as the New York music industry. It’s a more authentic, introspective sound. They aren’t attempting to be a balls-out metal band, and are seriously stepping away from any Judas Priest/Dio-related influence and attempting to set up their own musical arena outside that of the typical metal rat-race. Still produced by Peter Collins, who worked on the technically flawless Mindcrime, he pushes even further in the sonic arena, making an album that’s incredibly crisp, but with an incredible depth and presence.

Instead of covering socio-political topics through a metaphor or cautionary tale, as they had in their last three albums, this is the first time they discuss the perils and impact of our changing world directly, in songs that use their soundscape and direct feel as a vehicle for commentary. The lyrics discuss gang violence (“Empire”), struggling with disabilities (“Best I Can”), the environment (“Resistance”), and homelessness (“Della Brown”). But the balance of the album avoids preachiness, and mixes the message with a heavily introspective deep-dive into emotion and interpersonal relationships. And that’s mixed with this new sound: a more textured musical take, with smooth guitars and the occasional twelve-string mixed with a very up-front but laid-back bass sound, and Geoff Tate’s lyrics going from the all-out operatic to a more integrated and subdued yet effective part of the band.

This isn’t a concept album, in the strictest sense. But it uses many samples, intros, and outros to stitch together the first half of its its 63:20 length to be nearly seamless, and some argue that this makes it a loosely-coupled sort of concept album, although I’ve never seen a line-by-line explanation of what that story would be. But it adds to the depth of the album, making it something easy for me to visualize, and something more than just a collection of sounds.

Some of the best songwriting work on the album comes from guitarist Chris DeGarmo, who broadens his songwriting by heading inward to the more internal and emotional themes. An example (with lyrics about Tate’s future wife), is “Jet City Woman”†, the typical tale of “I’m on the road a long time and have come back to my love,” although it’s a much more effective vehicle than the typical Motley Crue or Journey take on the same subject. And the title? The city of Seattle was once known as Jet City, due to the overwhelming presence of Boeing, who used to be headquartered there, and who built many of their passenger planes there. In the early 80s, the city held a contest and officially changed its nickname to the more pedestrian “Emerald City,” although many references to the old name still exist. I remember when I lived there in the late 90s, I used to often drive by a place called Jet City Pizza, which always used to be an unconscious homage (in my mind, at least) to this album.

One minor nit I’ve always had is the voiceover part in the middle of the song “Empire,” which laments the federal government’s spending on crime. Sorry Geoff, but the reason the federal government spends less on crime is because a huge amount of law enforcement is paid at the state and local level. One could use the same logic to lament the amount the feds spend on education, which is largely paid for by local taxes. I remember reading somewhere that Tate got the idea for this song based on a Vietnamese gangland murder spree in the Little Saigon area of Rainier Valley. I didn’t know this until much later, but when I lived in Seattle, this was the closest strip of fast-food joints, and I drove out in this area at least a few times a week. (It’s also the former location of Sick’s Stadium, where baseball’s ill-fated Seattle Pilots played their only season before moving to Milwaukee and becoming the Brewers. Both Elvis and Hendrix played outdoor shows there; it was torn down in 1979 and is now the location of a Lowe’s hardware store.)

And then there’s “Silent Lucidity.” I’ve got to admit, I clearly remember the first time I heard this song in my car, during the first listen of this album, and how I thought “what the fuck? They are totally going to get sued by Pink Floyd for completely ripping off their entire style!” This Michael Kamen-orchestrated ballad seems to talk about lucid dreaming, but Tate has always said it’s about a parent watching their child sleep. Like classic Waters-era Floyd, this song was one of my go-to numbers to listen to when I got in ultra-depresso mode around this era. And then, all of a sudden, it went from about nobody ever hearing about Queensryche to literally everyone praising this song. MTV played the video constantly (yes, they played videos then) and it even got airplay on mainstream FM radio. I’m sure it was played at many a high school prom, and it popped up on all sorts of “power ballad” compilation albums you could order at three in the morning from a K-Tel TV ad. Suddenly, a band whose last album took over a year to break into the gold level of sales status entered the Billboard top ten within two weeks, and ultimately went triple platinum. I’ve always wondered how many people bought Empire, listened to that one song for a month, and then went on to the new MC Hammer album or whatever else. This gave the band the level of success to headline tours and record their next album completely on their own terms, but I always wonder if this was the beginning of the end in some way.

Empire was remastered and re-released in 2003, with three bonus tracks. There’s the overly hammy “Scarborough Fair,” the ho-hum “Dirty Lil Secret” and the decent but doesn’t-fit-here “Last Time in Paris.” They’re all nice to have, but the 11+3 track version of the album just doesn’t seem right. If you’ve got the cash, you can hunt down an import gold disc version of the album, but it’ll probably cost you $50. I finally got a copy of the 24K version and ripped it with lossless encoding to iTunes; it’s a good way to go, if you’re into that sort of thing. I also have the original tape somewhere – it’s shell is worn clean, but it’s a nice reminder of that era.

This album has always meant a lot to me. When it came out in 1990, I was commuting about 45 minutes each way to school, which meant I listened to this album at least once a day for months. Coming back to it, this album reminds me so much of that year of my life, and takes me back to that period so directly. And when I was in Seattle, sitting in my tiny studio apartment, songs like “Another Rainy Night” created the perfect soundtrack for those few somber post-college years of depression and emotion. Not only do I consider this the master album for the band, but it’s one of my personal favorites of all time due to the history and emotion interleaved within it.

Rating: 10

So the Garage Days Re-Revisited EP is long out of print, and is going for a bajillion dollars a bootlegged copy on eBay ten years later. The band decided it would be a good idea to re-issue the record, but add some new stuff to force both new and old fans to buy the album and finance Lars Ulrich’s Picasso fetish. So they made this a two-CD set, consisting of all the old and unreleased b-sides and other rarities, along with a CD’s worth of new studio renditions of covers of old favorites from the band’s influences.

If you’re a fan of the Load-era Metallica, this is a win-win; you get all of the really old b-side stuff you never bought because you were either seven years old when it came out or because you were a Vanilla Ice fan back then and didn’t like metal until it became popular. As far as the new stuff, the song that got video rotation (yes, they made videos for covers on a b-side wrapup compilation) was the Bob Seger classic “Turn the Page.” As much as I loathe James Hetfield’s new “yeaahh yeahhh!” singing style, it works well on this, and provides us with one of those “the road is rough” moments like Poison and Motley Crue belted out consistently, except it feels much more genuine. If Lars Ulrich were killed in Cliff Burton’s bus accident and the band eventually slowed down to just doing songs like this, I’d probably still like it. I couldn’t get through the first side of the disc more than once or twice though, and admittedly, I only cared about having all of the rarities in one place.

The collection of b-sides is great, but it also shows you how far Metallica has fallen. It starts with Garage Days in its full glory, followed with “Am I Evil” and “Blitzkrieg,” before going into the …Justice singles, “Breadfan” and “The Prince.” That’s where I stopped collecting as a kid. Then you get the “new” sounding covers, which are so-so, and the four Motorhead covers from Lemmy’s birthday where Metallica dressed up as Lemmy, which are pretty sad.

If you need the old covers, grab a copy (read my separate review for Garage Days…) That’s the only reason to spend money on any post-black album Metallica, and it’s a bad trap to get you to buy a CD of crappy stuff along with it.

Review: 6

When I hear that a group of musicians first got together in a Yes tribute band, the last thing I expect is anything heavy.  The first ten seconds of the new ARZ album, Solomon’s Key, completely changed that opinion for me.  Forget any preconceived notions that a couple of guys imitating London’s premier prog giants would be doodling in some Roger Dean-backdropped universe of lofty art school tunes – this duo is putting out some awesome instrumental progressive rock that mixes a prog metal edge with a deep artistic core and incredible musicianship.  It’s also one of those albums that constantly makes me think “how do they ever play this stuff live?”  But they do!

First of all, I did say duo. The Portland, Oregon-based ARZ consists of guitarist Steve Adams and drummer Merrill Hale. What’s interesting about this is that both also double on an array of various synth and electronic doodads, with Hale adding to his standard drum kit a Roland SPD-20 drum pad, essentially a Rock Band controller on steroids that triggers a whole array of various synth and world music percussion instruments. Adams also uses some MIDI magic to play along his synth parts while still tackling the guitar parts. (He’s also the de facto vocalist of the band, although there are no lyrics on the latest release.) When I first heard of these guys, I thought maybe this was just a gimmick or a studio-only trick, something done in lieu of having some additional members, or while between bassists and additional guitar players. I’ve often heard bands doubling up the strings in the studio, or playing along with a drum machine, in a demo-only situation while seeking out other members. But this is a system that works well for the band, and within the first track or two of this release, the complexity of the music made me forget I wasn’t listening to a four or five-piece group.

Solomon’s Key is an eight-track concept album of sorts, using the theme of the myth and mystery of the Middle East as a medium to explore various minor-mode tapestries of instrumental rock. I don’t know the exact storyline behind any of this album, although I know King Solomon from the old testament of the bible, and there’s a medieval book on magic called Solomon’s Key that might be part of the mythology of the songs here. There are three sub-five minute songs following more rock-oriented structure, but the rest are longer form pieces, with the title cut weighing in at just over 18 minutes.

What I like most about this album is that it weaves heavy, straight-up metal with more complex, prog-oriented melodies, and doesn’t do one while sacrificing the quality of the other. For example, the first cut, “Almadel”, starts with a super-low-end power metal start, like a Nu-metal band out of the gate, but then immediately cuts into a harmonized, Steve Howe-esque clean guitar melody, and trades off intricate verses with metal-form guitar solos. Adams is a student of classical technique and jazz performance, and uses his intricate playing style to meld together multiple styles of music. This is a band that’s well-schooled in all of the classics, like Rush, Yes, and ELP, but manages to mix in jazz and world music influences into a project that moves beyond the typical rock band structure. Add to this the fact that Hale’s robo-drum setup enables him to weave things like tubular bells and glock within the acoustic and electric guitar, and you’ve got an incredible soundscape.

Aside from the writing and musicianship, I was also impressed with the quality of recording and production in general. For a release without the funding of a major label, there’s an incredible amount of production skill here. They’ve skipped the step of physical retail on this one, and went direct to digital, making this release available only on iTunes, Napster, and other digital format mediums.

Head over to thearzuniverse.com and check these guys out. You can also find some video evidence there that these two can actually play this stuff live. And stay tuned – their next album is already in the works!

Rating: 9

My first thought when I heard Queensryche was releasing another compilation album was “christ, didn’t they just do this fifteen minutes ago?” Okay, it was more like four years earlier, but the Capitol Records 12-track Classic Masters contained no new material, and was essentially useless; the 2000 compilation Greatest Hits was barely passable, with two non-album tracks. So is the 2007 stab at the same thing just another ploy to get the masses to buy another “Silent Lucidity plus other tracks” CD?

Well, no. There is some confusion, however. First, the title of the album is the same as the title of a previously-released CD single. Also, if you get the album from iTunes, it’s titled The Best of Queensryche and two songs are substituted. (Don’t worry, they are from Q2K and Mindcrime 2 – you’re not missing anything.) Also, there is a regular, 17-track, single disc version – that is fairly worthless, with the exception of “Real World,” a decent track that originally appeared on the Last Action Hero soundtrack and involves a heavy amount of Michael Kamen orchestration.

The real “meat” of this collection is a second CD that only appears in a “collector’s edition,” and that is loaded with a whopping 15 tracks of new, non-album goodness. Here’s the rundown:

• “Take Hold of the Flame,” “Walk In the Shadows,” and “Before the Storm” – These are all demos made by the band when they were still called Myth, and were previously unreleased. The band only sounds vaguely like Queensryche from their first EP, and more resembles early Fates Warning. Other than the titles, the songs bear absolutely no resemblance to their later studio editions. I can’t say I will listen to these over and over, but it is awesome to hear the band lay down some early progress for us to hear. (Note: if you bought from iTunes, these will be labelled as Myth tracks, so don’t fret if they don’t show up in the Q section of your music library.)
• “Waiting For the Kill,” “No Sanctuary,” and “Prophecy” – These are all demos from The Warning, and they’re different songs, but there are bits and pieces that were clearly reused elsewhere. For example, solos and big chunks of “Waiting” end up becoming “NM156.”
• The acoustic version of “I Dream In Infrared” from the Rage For Order sessions. Cool, but it’s been released as a b-side at least once or twice before.
• “Della Brown” from the Unplugged session, and “Silent Lucidity” live, from a B-side for “Bridge.” You probably own ten copies of these also.
• The I-have-many-times b-sides “Chasing Blue Sky,” “Someone Else?” with full band, “Scarborough Fair,” and the Empire-era “Dirty Li’l Secret.”
• From the Ford Fairlane soundtrack is “Last Time in Paris,” which was a b-side from one of the Empire singles. I’d totally forgotten about this song! It’s one of those windows straight back to 1992 when I picked up the single, and a very catchy tune.
• “Justified” – a completely new song, unreleased elsewhere. I’m not sure when this is recorded, but it’s got an excellent sound to it, and it’s almost worth the price of admission.

Overall, this is a decent collection, and the rarities make it a decent value. I don’t think of Queensryche as a band with a lot of odd material in the attic, but if you want to get it all in one swoop without spending tons on rare singles and bootlegs, this is the way to go.

Rating: 8.5

A fractal is a geometric shape that has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales, and is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language. That’s also a decent description of the latest release from the Bay-area quartet Fractal, because this sixteen-track album is a cohesive musical work with a focus on great detail and complex composition, but offering a wide swath of style.

Last time around, on 2003’s Continuum, the band was an instrumental trio (Nic Roozeboom on guitars/synth, Jim Mallonee on bass/synth, and Paul Strong on drums). This time, Josh Friedman comes to the fold on vocals and guitar, and the band pulls away from their previous instrumental moorings to explore new territory. If there’s any comparison to be made between this effort and Continuum, the prior album had more of a fusion-y freeform feel to it, while Sequitur is much more structured and focused.

Friedman’s lyrics pull the compositions in another direction, with some of the numbers being almost ballady, in working with his vocals. A good example of this is “Giving Tree,” which is a very smooth and conventional ballad. It’s not something you’d expect from a band that’s usually flogging out full-bore in an irrational meter with notes all over the page. But it works well, and it’s an enjoyable piece.

In a similar vein is one of my favorite tracks is “A Fraction of One.” I’m a huge Peter Gabriel fan, and this draws from the same type of phantasmagorical lyrics over an ethereal soundtrack you’d find on the first few of Gabriel’s albums or in his soundtrack work. The song builds to an evil crescendo, with the guitar thrumming away, and the conclusion marked with the gong of an ancient clock. It’s an example of a completely different direction than the earlier three-piece instrumental recording.

There are a couple of interesting diversion that veer away from the center of the prog-rock highway. One is “The Monkey’s Paw”, which has angsty lyrics sung like a 90s alt-rock band, but draped over a complex beat that slowly spirals into a speed metal guitar solo. The band gets back into the fold with the big payoff, the three-part “Churn”, which ends with an almost electronica-oriented zip through with a trance-like synth beat, and a very screaming, fusion-esque guitar solo that I enjoyed.

This isn’t a straightforward album that everyone is going to “get” on the first listen, but that’s a big part of its appeal. It’s a lot more of an artistic challenge, structuring songs with odd-meter bits and complex drumming, lying underneath a complex soundscape of advanced melodic guitar riffage that ranges from playful to intrinsically powerful. It’s the kind of thing you’ll have to give repeat listens to fully appreciate everything that’s going on.

The self-produced CD was recorded all-digitally by the band “all over the Bay Area” – no word if that means a series of extensive home studios or picking up shifts at local booths, but it features pretty clean production and a tight sound overall. The cover art was done by Derek K Nielsen (www.daementia.com).

Fractal is very much worth checking out. Go to http://www.fractal-continuum.com to find out more; you can also pick up this CD at CDBaby.

Rating: 8.5

The first single from Queensryche’s Here in the Now Frontier album was the first song on the album, “Sign of the Times”, the somewhat political/societal rocker written by Chris DeGarmo. (This is not to be confused with the 2007 greatest hits compilation of the same name.) It’s not a bad song, and an okay choice for a single, so it appears in original studio album format on this four-song CD.

There’s also a new song as a b-side, somewhat rare for the band, who have only let a handful of cuts drop from their studio albums. This one’s called “Chasing Blue Sky,” and it’s a very moody and laid-back number, written by Geoff Tate and drummer Scott Rockenfield. It actually sounds much more like something Tate would later do on his self-titled solo album a few years later. I’m not a big fan of this track myself, partially because it’s so wallowy and uninteresting, and because it’s the first Queensryche song to have a harmonica solo in it, which is just plain stupid. But prior to all of the albums being re-released with bonus tracks (and, I guess, before Napster, Kazaa, and the like made it easy to just steal these kind of tracks without much effort), this was a somewhat elusive track to find, which means people were willing to pay twenty bucks for four songs.

The album’s also rounded out by two cuts from that 1992 MTV Unplugged show that was broadcast exactly once and then milked by record labels but never released in a proper fashion. Here you get “Silent Lucidity” (probably the big money shot for most part-time fans of the band) and “The Killing Words.” (I think you can now get all of the tracks for the unplugged show if you buy a certain number of the re-released albums, but I haven’t done the math to figure it out; there might be one or two tracks missing. The whole show, including false starts and second takes, is widely bootlegged.)

Trivia: the liner notes say “Queensryche is still:”, and then Chris Degarmo left about ten seconds later.

The whole idea of buying this is somewhat moot now. If you buy the new re-release of HitNF you get all three bonus tracks here, plus the unplugged version of “I Will Remember”. But back in my day, when eBay didn’t exist and you couldn’t file-share this stuff or buy the re-release, you had to buy this. It’s an okay grouping of tracks, but only for completists.

Rating: 8

The CD-single for the song “Hollow Years” came out to support the album Falling Into Infinity, and contains two versions of the song “Hollow Years”, the album version and a radio edit. That’s not what interests me about this CD, however, as I think that’s one of the weaker songs on the album, probably because it was made to be all “radio-friendly” and was probably likewise pushed by the record company. It had a video made that was never seen on TV and was a waste of approximately $100,000, but is hoarded by Dream Theater completists.

There are two things of interest on this CD. The first is a demo of the song “You Not Me.” It seems that during the demo stage, this song was called “You Or Me,” and the words were a bit different. That’s cool, in the sense that you get to see that even perfectionists like these guys change their minds (or have their minds changed by producers) and don’t just instantly shit out perfect songs. It’s also cool to hear what one of their songs sounds like at the demo stage. It’s not as low-quality as portastudio or jambox recording; it’s higher quality than most amateur bands who self-produce a CD. But it’s markedly different than the final product you get through the real recording.

The other interesting thing is a b-side called “The Way It Used To Be”. The track starts with a slower but upbeat verse before taking off a bit. There’s also what sounds like a theramin, or maybe it’s the creative use of a Leslie stack, for a weird wobbling sound. The song starts out great, but it’s too repetitive and drags on, with a total length of almost eight minutes.

Overall, this is a curious little single. I really do like the two new songs here, but you have to weigh in the cost of actually finding one of these things versus what you’ll get.

Rating: 8

Well, here’s a tough sell. How do you compile a greatest hits album for a band that only has one arguable “hit?” And furthermore, how do you sell a compilation album when a band’s core demographic are fanatic completists who most likely buy every single item ever issued by the band? There aren’t many casual Dream Theater fans, and it’s not like someone’s going to hear one of their songs on the local hot-100 radio station and rush out to buy this. So is it worth the $15 to buy this?

Well, maybe. This compilation includes two discs: a “dark side” of heavier metal numbers, and a “light side” of the more melodic songs. It’s an interesting way to group things, with the down side that I never realized Dream Theater recorded so damn many ballady songs until they were all presented back-to-back. At any rate, you get 22 tracks, which is a pretty decent value for $15. Plus you maintain continuity in owning every one of the band’s releases, which might calm the OCD demons in your head if you suffer from the “must have every release” syndrome.

And there are a few kinda-new things here. First, there’s “To Live Forever”, a B-Side from the “Lie” single. That wasn’t on any studio album; that’s also as far as you get with regard to original stuff. You also have a lot of remixes and radio edits and slightly different tracks. And three of the tracks from Images and Words are remastered. This is a big deal to some, because the original mix used a snare trigger throughout, and many a fanboy bitched and moaned about the production. Now, those three songs are mixed with a real snare. Unfortunately, after almost two decades of hearing the triggered snare, the regular one sounds weird to me. The remix does bring out some of the other percussion sound though, and the sax on “Another Day” sounds pretty crisp, too.

There’s not much else to say here. It’s a good grouping of songs, but it might not be an essential purchase to you, especially if you have other albums to catch up on. I don’t like greatest hits albums in general, but this isn’t bad.

Rating: 6

When an album is in the making for almost two decades, and the band goes through an almost 100% lineup change, serious questions emerge about the final product. And this means that most reviews of said product aren’t about the production or if the songs groove, but rather ask a million questions about what the hell happened. And that’s why two major questions clog the beginning of this review: did such a long wait damage or distress this work? And, is this even Guns N’ Roses?

For those not familiar with the chronology (maybe because you were born after their last album came out, which is entirely possible), The Spaghetti Incident? came out in November of 1993. This half-baked collection of covers and old punk tunes did contain Slash for the last time, but it also didn’t do well sales-wise, caused tension in the band, and generally flew under a lot of people’s radar. There was also a 1999 release of live recordings from 1987-1993, featuring the old lineup. But if you’re talking about originals, the last real release by the band was 1991’s Use Your Illusion albums. That’s a 17-year gap, and a lot has happened in the last 17 years.

Could a heavy metal band take a few decades off and come back with anything relevant? If you’ve listened to recent albums by any of the old monsters of rock from the 80s, it’s generally a disappointment. You typically get a retread of the simplest 80s hard rock, with a thin veneer of industri-synth beats and samples duct-taped over the gaps. GNR also dominated in a world with larger sales across fewer genres. When I was in high school and college, everyone was a GNR fan to some extent, from the preppies to the motorheads. It was not uncommon for people in my high school to be fans of New Kids on the Block and Guns N’ Roses. Now, music is so segmented and divided by the mass number of channels available for sales; people go to iTunes and buy the one song they like (or steal it). There’s no need to go to a record store and buy from their limited selection of displayed albums, which are put out by major labels and competed for shelf space in a system just short of collusion. Now there’s more of everything, but you get lost in that sea of everything, and a band like Guns N’ Roses isn’t going to pull a “Sweet Child” coup and go wall-to-wall with mass FM radioplay and MTV exposure. If they’re lucky, they’ll get a song on an obscure XM radio show that only metalheads listen to, and maybe maybe a ten second clip of a guitar solo will be used when some d-list skateboard dude trashes a grocery store on a reality TV show.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the freshness of this album. I thought maybe Axl started writing back in 1996 or 1997, and started with something akin to an old dude’s Korn, and then attempted to pig-lipstick the thing with a series of session dudes and fancy studio tricks. Then in 2008, it would sound like when a show like CSI has to have music at a heavy metal club (“ripped from the headlines”) and they hire four studio musicians/actors, dress them up in Hot Topic, and make them play a network executive’s idea of what down-and-dirty metal sounds like.

But that didn’t happen! First, the production is over the top good. Yes, given a decade of knob-twirling, it should be. But it sounds absolutely excellent. And it has a lot of riffage that gives it the feel of a hip, new metal sound. Without going into specifics right now, they do a lot of extremely impressive guitar solo work everywhere. It has this “dirty New York slum metal” sound, for lack of a better term. And the laid-on industrial bits and samples are nowhere near as bad or involved as I’d thought. There was a track on an Ahnold movie soundtrack a few years ago (titled “Oh my God”) that was very NiN-esque, but that isn’t on this album, and there isn’t anything approaching it. That’s good, because pretty much everyone hated that track, and it’s good that Rose didn’t continue in that vein.

Now, about the lineup issue. Of course, Slash left, along with Duff McCagan. That means every “original” member of the band except Axl had left, although late-replacement Dizzy Reed, remained on keys. The rotating door of guitar was held by Tommy Stinson and Robin Finck, with other key members including Buckethead, Bumblefoot, and Paul Tobias. (The actual personnel list is far too complicated to summarize, but there’s a wikipedia article out there with a giant chart explaining it. Seriously, the leadership of the Italian government over the last century is easier to explain.)

What this means though, is this could be considered an Axl Rose album, with a cast of dozens and the legal possession of the name of the band. And that radically changes the dynamics of the thing, because this kind of metal isn’t just a collection of music as much as it is a lifestyle, and a group’s collectiveness. The Rolling Stones would not be The Rolling Stones if the Mick/Keith combination was Mick Jagger and a half-dozen of whatever hotshit guitarists were looking for work at the time the album was recorded. Even if the guitarists were technically better than Keith Richards, the idea that you have these two musicians angling for the head spot in the band adds to the tension and ultimately the personality of the band. If you replace Slash with a dozen session musicians, it isn’t a band as much as it is a project. And despite the fact that there’s some incredible guitar work on this album, that’s the big issue here.

Another complaint is that there aren’t any songs on this album that “rock” from start to finish. There’s not a lot of consistent verse/chorus/verse “Mr. Brownstone” songs that work within the construct of a standard rock song without going off onto a strange tangent. The structures are more complicated, which are impressive, but it means the songs aren’t as accessible. That said, it isn’t like Rose bought a bunch of Yes and King Crimson records and went off writing odd-meter, 24-minute compositions. But as an example of this weirdness: in “Sheckler’s Revenge”, it starts sort of slow and dark, and about 40 seconds in, there’s what could best be described as a “disco hustle beat.” But within a dozen seconds, it swaps for a huge metal chorus riff with screaming, fret-tapping guitar. This odd arrangement is repeated again, and I wouldn’t doubt it if the same section was copied and pasted in whatever multimillion-dollar version of ProTools is used in the studio. If I was producing this song, I’d swap out the weird disco part and put in something that matched parts A and C, and then used different solo parts to make it more of a straightforward rock song. And you’d think in a dozen years, someone else would have thought of that, and maybe it was recorded a hundred times the way I described, but that’s not what you get.

The album as a whole is very ballady, and much more like the Illusion albums, especially in the sense that both of the 1991 albums could have been trimmed into one kick-ass CD with half the tracks left on the floor or sent to the Japanese market as B-sides. Chinese is like that, in that half of it completely clicks, and the other half is filled with WTF moments and didn’t resonate. Unfortunately, this isn’t on a song-by-song basis. In 1991, it was easy to make a mix tape and exclude “Get in the Ring”; with 2008’s release, I can’t trim out the grating “Now I know you” verse in “Better” that sounds like it doesn’t belong. Same thing with “There Was a Time” and its repetitive “It was the wrong time for you” pre-chorus bit that’s like hearing your annoying neighbor say “Where’s the beef” for the thousandth time, decades after any relevancy.

Axl’s vocals are impressive, but it worries me that he’ll blow out his voice within the first three shows of a tour (which will inevitably cause a full-scale riot with a death count comparable to a mid-sized aviation disaster.) Add to this the fact that any given part of this album is at least 128 tracks of sound laid on top of each other, some of them multiple vocal tracks from Rose, which won’t work at all live. If any band should take a page from the Beatles’ playbook and never play live again, GNR would be a great candidate. Besides, even after perfecting these 17 cuts, when they hit the road, everyone’s only going to want to hear “Sweet Child” anyway. And while Axl does some impressive work, there are other parts where he tries too hard. The screaming at the start of “Scraped” sounds like Rose is being anally raped, which is slightly off-putting.

The one thing I can say about the album is that it has the same haunting quality as Illusion that makes it easy to listen to it repeatedly. Maybe it’s that all of the songs have to do with that vague interpersonal struggle mixed with inner self-doubt and depression that made me listen to the double albums nonstop back in college. Or maybe that weird mix of not-rock structure keeps it fresh or burns it into my brain. Either way, after I get past all of the political issues behind this album, I did really enjoy it, and at the end of the day, I think it will be an album I will put in ten years from now and get instantly transported back to 2008, which always earns high marks in my book.

Rating: 9