Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Long live Queensryche…no matter which version you end up following. Due to a very public falling out there are now two versions of the group and the former lead vocalist of the original band, Geoff Tate, the man who made the lyrics sing as if pursued by hoards of irate angels robbed of their vocal cords, has returned with his version of this new Queensryche’s first album Frequency Unknown and that is where the confusion starts in earnest.
The confusion is rife in the mind as it is impossible to, no matter how intelligent you might be or willing to suspend the belief with the world’s biggest plumb line and a foreman who is willing to add a foot either way to the measurements to keep it interesting, get past the thought that Geoff Tate is not alongside his colleagues anymore. There were many things that made Queensryche great, when Chris De Garmo left the band, a huge chunk went and left a guitar shaped hole that really was never filled, yet the band survived and towards the end came out with the incredible American Soldier as in answer to the doubters. Geoff Tate’s voice was another and yet somehow on this new album it sounds as if he isn’t going to the range that made him a star and now sound more as if he knows that time has caught up with him.
Armed with new musicians and new songs this should be Geoff’s time to really shine but aside from the odd couple of songs such as The Weight of the World and Life Without You it has nothing to sway it in either direction, it just sits in the realm of will listen a couple of times, that’s nice, put it on the shelf for a year or two just in case. Even the four ‘bonus’ tracks that are on there, four of the great tracks that Queensryche recorded don’t have the same emotional pull as before. The worst being the once sublime Silent Lucidity, one of rocks greatest musical accomplishments and a song that live is phenomenal is reduced to sounding like the frightened mews of a kitten with its head stuck in hole in the fence.
Perhaps the worst thing anybody can ever say about an album or a piece of theatre is that is average, it leaves no quarter way to dislike it or praise the effort in later life. It could be as listeners, even the most loyal of fans who followed this band right from the very start, still hark back to the real highs of the group’s history, when they really were one of the most forward thinking, progressive thinkers in Metal/Rock. All things come to an end, the foreman with the dodgy plumb line can only hold sway for so long before the mystique finally runs out and what is left is just plain and common place.
It can only be hoped that this is not the end of the story, Geoff Tate is far too good to let it happen but where are the days of the imagination being held aloft as a shining beacon, where is the man who during a gig wore the word liar on the back of his cut off denim jacket at President Bush with such pride. No one should ever become ordinary when they have given so much.
Frequency Unknown doesn’t cut through the static at all.
Ian D. Hall