Keep in mind for any fans of queensryche that by some stroke of dumb, rare luck find this blog and respond with anything i say about this band with a "no shit mate", this is all coming form a guy that has just started to sit down and listen to a lot of their material and learn about their doings from up until now. I'm no long time fan, nor even a casual fan, though my overall opinion will pop up at some point in this blog. So yeah, back off bro.
Before there were hispters infecting any coffee shop around a way before grunge wasn't even a concept, there were a little band from seattle, washington known at first as the mob. Changing their name to queensreich and then to ryche to avoid anything involvement with them crazy nazis. They mad e their debut with a 4 track ep that displayed classic, fast paced early power metal and for it was, it was a good, short listen. A year later and they made a big surprised for a lot people with their first full length album "the warning". A shift in musical change is evident with what would be their most known sound: mid paced riffs and progressive arrangements. Both that and their follow up, "rage for order", sold well and were welcomed with good reception. and then operation:mindcrime happened.
Among the many things that happened to queensryche (good or bad) was the release of their 4th album OM and it quickly cemented their popularity. The album that is seen as one of the text book examples of a concept album and one done incredibly well. A story involving a drug addict getting pulled into a life of political and social corruption and hypocrisy featuring snippets of people acting out parts of the story as the very characters from said story, back up with amazing musicianship and geoff tate's (then) powerful singing make this and all around great album.
Their career continued to march on with their follow up "empires" which featured many popular songs like jet city woman and best i can, as well as probably their biggest hit silent lucidity. 4 years later after taking some time off and promised land came out and it was then that queensryche's career started to wane a bit, like other metal and hard rock bands at that time, due to the popularity of alternative rock and also grunge which ironically mostly came straight from the band's home state. It Seemed to have affected the bands music with the release of the oddly titled "hear in the now frontier" which a lot of people reacted appropriately with "what". Gone were the complex and powerful arrangements and singing and what's present on it is stripped down alternative/hard rock and sadly, it stayed like that throughout the bands whole career.
At this point i'll just jump in and give my take on all this. From what i'm looking at, 1997 can be seen as the year queensryche stopped being a good band, turned into a mediocre band, and then slowly descended into a godawful band. the latter though, i'll save for a bit later. Back in the 80s, queensryche, along with other bands like dream theater, fates warning, crimson glory, lethal, and so forth created and popularized progressive metal in it's heyday. They took metal and fused it with the complexity and dexterity of prog rock and they all made some genuinely good and memorable tunes and queensryche were very well known for this. For a lot of long running bands, it's common for them to change their sound mostly to avoid sounding too redundant and possibly try something different for once in their career, release a few or several duds along the way and with queensryche it's no different, but it's so much worse here.
I'll be nice and say that while albums like now frontier, q2k, tribe, and, to an extent, operation:mindcrime 2, they were weak albums, but had some okay moments despite being dull and derivative rock albums, american soldier and dedicated to chaos, however, are insultingly bad. Long time listeners of the band would obviously know this, but i was almost stunned at how terrible these two were. I won't go into too much depth and detail, but the most i'll say about these two grime covered puke stains is this, first off american soldier. If i was a veteran soldier that has fought for my country and this album was made about those like me, i'd sooner blow my brains out before PTSD kicked in and added insult to injury, also tate's daughter can not sing for shit. Dedicated to chaos, it's the kind of banal and forgettable rock music that makes guys like nickleback look like UFO.
So what was it that made these guys so bad? Several factors, the first one is the departure of founding member and guitarist chris degarmo in 1998 and then there was tate's continued "experimentation" that at first caused the band to suffer. Tate seemed to have been most of the reasons why the band has went through so much hell for the last 10 or so years with the inclusion of having his wife be the band's manager and the rest of band claiming that they no longer had a voice of their own and that tate and his wife were the ones controlling how the band should do things, regardless of what they had to say. That and tate's voice no longer being as good as it used to be, hence why the shift from prog metal to alternative/hard rock. A case of megalomaniacal behavior i suppose. It got a lot sour when the rest of the band not only fired tate's wife from management, but also his daughter from the group's own fanclub all without tate's knowing, you can imagine it not being a lush and pretty sight caught wind of it during an event at sao paolo, although in tate's defense, the band doing all this without his knowledge or consent is a very scumbag-y thing to do sp in this case, they weren't that much better. Seriously, when you have an incident this bad that it has it's own separate wikipedia article, you know it's going to be a break up worthy of being on a rolling stones top ten list, oh wait, it did.
This was an issue that resulted in the band having to go to court over all this, tate, out of bitterness and just being pissy about getting the boot, formed his own band with several other musicians and if that weren't enough, called his band queensryche (both he and the remaining QR members were given permission to use both names for the time being) and released their first album called "frequency unknown". In case you missed it, frequency unknown has the abbreviations F U. Apparently tate is actually a pissed off 14 year old trapped in a grown man's body, though that also would explain some of the incredibly questionable musical choices he's made (seriously a hip hop opener for american soldier?!).
Here's my thing, personally, i think the band should of broken up sooner or have gone on another hiatus. Had they done either one of these, they probably wouldn't of gone through the amount of shit they had to go through right now. A lot of people would consider them one of the greatest metal bands of all time, and while i see where they're coming from and as much as i do respect the band for doing some great stuff in the past, to me, they would of been so much better if the second half of their catalog never existed. Tate also show of left the band by his own accord instead of dragging them through the mud rather than just be seen as a great singer turned douche nozzle. I'll still listen to their old albums and, as i write this, their new album with todd la torre is pretty decent so far so i there's some ray of sunshine on this bands current status.
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