Though, like the Beatles and, I guess, by extension, PINK FLOYD, all four members wrote songs and took the spotlight, even if they still had two “main” guys who wrote more songs and are more well-known than the other two guys – namely over-the-top, theatrical, piano-playing lead singer with a four-octave voice Farrokh “Freddie Mercury” Bulsara (who like many gay people was into big theatrical gestures and show tunes) and classically-inspired, shredding-metal-guitar virtuoso, Brian May, who could just as easily switch to acoustic guitar and play in a variety of styles, and also sang from time to time in his pleasant normal singing voice. The other two guys were of course bass player John Deacon, who got the rest of the band into funk and soul, and solid, aggressive rock drummer Roger Taylor, who also occasionally sang and kinda sounds like Roger Daltrey or Roger Waters, which makes sense, since his name is also Roger.
With that all said, I still consider Queen to be part of a second wave of heavy metal that went from 1973 – 1979 and sort of links the post-hippie heavy rock of your SABBATH and ZEPPELIN with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Other bands I group as second wave metal include UFO, SWEET, SCORPIONS, RAINBOW, THIN LIZZY, AC/DC, JUDAS PRIEST, and VAN HALEN; bands that replaced a lot of the jamming, bluesy, and psychedelic elements of early heavy rock and heavy metal with shorter, faster, tighter, and more concise songs, chugga-chugga riffs, brighter guitar tones, and shredding neo-classical solos; setting the stage in the 70s for the 80s metal that was to come.
And Queen WAS a metal band quite a bit of the time. Then Freddie Mercury grew a mustache and chopped his hair, and it seems the metal went with it. I will clear all of this up for you shortly.
Queen (1973)
What a way to make a first impression! Usually it takes a band a few albums to develop their sound, find their footing, and work through their influences before they release the album that defines them; and then they ride that sound for a few years before trying other stuff and alienating their hard-earned fan base. But Queen just decided to launch their career with a nearly perfect album on their first try; where crushing riffs and classically influenced guitar solos dance alongside pretty piano, folky acoustic parts and four-part vocal harmonies, creating an early masterpiece of melodic heavy rock and heavy metal.
It all begins on an uplifting, inspirational note with the dah-digga-dah-digga, galloping, super-riffy, multi-guitar tracked “Keep Yourself Alive”, which I reckon is just telling the listener to keep yer head up and persevere, because, hey, why not? But then it quickly seems to take a total left turn with “Doing All Right”, this soft rock song with piano… until Brian May clobbers you over the head with his distorted power chords, and the song gets all rockin’ ‘n’ fast. Well it’s not speed metal fast, but it’s definitely a song you can bang your head to. You know what song IS fast, though? The under two minute punk-metal ripper “Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll”! How did this come out in 1973? Forget your Stooges or New York Dolls; “Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll” is like the Ramones with tougher drumming courtesy of Roger Taylor and metal guitar solos. It’s pretty pathetic that people will say how “ahead of his time” David Bowie was for doing a song like “Hang On to Yourself”, but nobody seems to acknowledge “Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll” for doing the same thing, only heavier and faster.
On the other hand, some have gone as far as to say Queen is a progressive rock band. Granted, songs like “Great King Rat” have a bunch of different parts in them, so there’s clearly a progressive element to their sound. But, come on; the first Queen album has ten concise songs, is just under 40 minutes long, and Roger Taylor for the most part just plays your 4/4 rock beats; not some crazy ass King Crimson 13/8 timing on songs that take up an entire side of an LP, ya dig? If you really wanna get sassy and bold, I’d consider the first Queen album to be the ur-text of power metal.
And, in spite of the heavy riffs and killer solos throughout the album, songs like “Liar”, in which Freddie Mercury does call and response vocals with himself, and “Jesus”, in which a choir of Freddie Mercuries sings about “going down to see the lord Jesus”, are full of that over the top, show tune-y theatrical flair you probably already associated with Freddie Mercury. Though, I wonder if “Jesus” was inspired by the ALICE COOPER song “Second Coming.” It’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility, since they’re both songs about Jesus, and Queen could have heard the Alice Cooper song and thought, “ah ha, well, if that Alice Cooper band can do a song about the second coming of Christ, we can do one about the first!”
Speaking of inspiration, “Son and Daughter” sounds like Queen channeling BLACK SABBATH, and the lyrics appear to be downright anti-women’s lib:
Tried to be son and daughter rolled into one
You said you’d equal any man for having your fun
Now didn’t you feel surprised to find
The cap just didn’t fit
The world expects a man
To buckle down and to shovel shit
What’ll you do for loving
When it’s only just begun
I want you to be a woman
Holy MRA, Brian May!
But, yeah, other than the piano rocker “My Fairy King”, which has an intro that sounds like the Charlie Brown theme, and the acoustic pop ballad “The Night Comes Down”, Queen really is just a guitar album for heavy metal guitar people…
…who also like pianos, acoustic guitars, four-part vocal harmonies, over-the-top theatrical gestures, unabashedly optimistic lyrics, and biblical references. In other words, power metal fans, such as myself.
Good job, Queen. Ya done good.
Queen II (1974)
The second Queen album seems to be a Tolkien-inspired concept album about kings, queens, knights, nymphs, ogres, and a tatterdemalion, which, according to my Webster dictionary, is something that’s in a state of disrepair or tatters, in case you were wondering. Apparently, Freddy Mercury was working on a sword and sorcery epic and just decided to make it the lyrics to Queen II. I suppose Brian May was also on some sort of medieval fantasy kick, since three of his four writing contributions are about that as well. Though, obviously, his opening cut “Procession”, with its thumping pulse beat and regal melodies, isn’t about anything, since it’s an instrumental. And his “White Queen (As It Began)” is complemented by Freddy Mercury’s own “The March of the Black Queen.”
At least, I think it is…
Oh dear, I just read the lyrics to “The March of the Black Queen”, and, uh, let’s just say, it’s a good thing this song didn’t become a huge hit; else Queen would have a lot of explaining to do to the PC scolds of the world. Well, I guess, it would be cool if it became a hit, because, like every song on Queen II, it rules. But then it’s a good thing it didn’t become a hit, because if it was more popular, it would have pissed off a lot of people, eventually forcing Queen to become a bunch of bitches and apologize profusely for being so insensitive and then attempt to make it all okay by retiring the song from their live set, losing our respect in the process; kinda like the STONES did with “Brown Sugar.” And we wouldn’t want that. So, let’s just be glad it’s an excellent deep cut on album of excellent deep cuts.
Oh dear, I just read the lyrics to “The March of the Black Queen”, and, uh, let’s just say, it’s a good thing this song didn’t become a huge hit; else Queen would have a lot of explaining to do to the PC scolds of the world. Well, I guess, it would be cool if it became a hit, because, like every song on Queen II, it rules. But then it’s a good thing it didn’t become a hit, because if it was more popular, it would have pissed off a lot of people, eventually forcing Queen to become a bunch of bitches and apologize profusely for being so insensitive and then attempt to make it all okay by retiring the song from their live set, losing our respect in the process; kinda like the STONES did with “Brown Sugar.” And we wouldn’t want that. So, let’s just be glad it’s an excellent deep cut on album of excellent deep cuts.
Like the first album, Queen II is filled top to bottom with gorgeous melodies, heavy riffs, multi-tracked instrumentation, including pianos, harpsichord, and acoustic guitars, and, of course, those four-part vocal harmonies that go “ah-ah-ah” all over the damn place. Basically, Queen does everything they did on their first album, only better. In fact, they even took the final cut from Queen, “Seven Seas of Rhye…”, which is just 75 seconds of pleasant piano plunking, and expanded it into a fully fleshed out three minute mini-epic confusingly titled “Seven Seas of Rhye.”
And, while Queen II is some sort of concept album, not every song is even tied to the concept; certainly not Roger Taylor’s groovin’, xylophone-tinged heavy rocker “Loser in the End”, nor the 80 second “woe is me” piano lament “Nevermore”, nor the pretty-as-the-prettiest-girl-you’ve-ever-seen hopeless romantic ballad “Funny How Love Is.” But, even if they were, would it matter? Do you give a flying hoot about the story running through the album? Were you ever once compelled to find out what “Rhye” is or what significance is held by its “seven seas”? Would it make any difference to you if the story on Queen II was about how Mr. McPoop takes a poop and then can’t take a poop anymore and then has to find his magical enema so he can poop again, and the last song was called “Seven Seas of Poop”?
Of course it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t make the heavenly yet pummeling “Father to Son” or the fantasy metal with rewinding tape sounds and “ah-ah-ah” intro “Ogre Battle” or the hyper harpsichord, bopping polka of “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” or Brian May’s dreamy and wistful acoustic ballad “Some Day One Day” or any of the other songs on Queen II any less compulsively listenable. Did I mention that Queen II is my favorite Queen album? It is.
Also, I lied when I said Queen does everything they did on their first album, only better. Queen II doesn’t have a fast song. And I mean a FAST song. I think you know where I’m going with this.
Sheer Heart Attack (1974)
“Stone Cold Crazy” really does seem completely out of place on a rock album from 1974; four or five years before the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and inconspicuously placed between two soft piano tunes. It’s just two minutes and fifteen seconds of palm-muted riffing, manic vocals, and shredding solos set to a tight and fast thrash beat, making all the competition, except for “Set Me Free” by SWEET, sound sluggish in comparison. It’s like, I love Black Sabbath as much as the next guy, but it’s hard to go back and listen to even Sabbath’s “fast” songs like “Paranoid” or “Symptom of the Universe” and not think, yeah, but “Stone Cold Crazy”, and I guess, by extension, “Set Me Free”, curb stomp the shit out of this.
But, as awesome and ahead of its time as “Stone Cold Crazy” is, there are twelve other songs on Sheer Heart Attack; none of which, by the way, are called “Sheer Heart Attack.” It’s true that Queen has a song called “Sheer Heart Attack”, but it wouldn’t exist for another three years and three more albums.
Sheer Heart Attack is generally thought of as the album where Queen started to become a Beatles-inspired, multi-genre pop-rock band. This claim is especially bolstered by the album’s big hit, the fun and catchy “Killer Queen”, with its plinking piano, skipping-through-the-park vibe, and pseudo-sophisticated lyrical references. But it’s not as though there was a dearth of pianos and “ooh-ahh” vocals on the first two Queen albums, so I find this claim to be a bit of a stretch. Hell, one of the other four “ohh-ahh” piano tunes is a callback to the Kingdom of Rhye themes of the previous album. Oh, and speaking of the Beatles, “She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos)” is a total “Here, There, and Everywhere”-style snoozer.
On the other hand, the album also contains John Deacon’s inaugural Queen writing credit, an acoustic/electric pop-rocker called “Misfire”, allowing me to finally say something substantive about Queen’s bass player. “Misfire” is an under-two-minute piece of jangly, uplifting ear-candy, so good job, guy! There’s also the banjo and standup bass strumming novelty ragtime of “Bring Back That Leroy Brown.” Queen sycophants praise it as brilliant, but I think it’s worth a once-through listen, and that’s about it. After all, if you want ragtime music, go and get some real ragtime music, not some rock band’s interpretation of ragtime music!
Incidentally, if you’re a hard rock and heavy metal fan, you’ll probably turn off Sheer Heart Attack after the eighth song, which, if you didn’t already guess, is “Stone Cold Crazy.” All that other stuff I mentioned, John Deacon’s jangly pop song, the novelty ragtime song, the ass-boring Beatles type song, and two of the “ooh-ahh” piano ballads, including the mercifully short “Dear Friends” are all from the album’s last five songs.
All the hard rockin’, head bangin’, guitar shreddin’, chord crunchin’, proto-NWOBHM metal and metal leaning hard rock can be found in the album’s first half. There ain’t much of it, but what’s there, hooooeeee!!! In fact, if Sheer Heart Attack was edited down to a five-song EP, it might very well have been considered the earliest release in the NWOBHM! Don’t believe me? Check this out:
➤ “Brighton Rock” – More like “Brighton METAL” if you ask me! A total riff ‘n’ solo shred fest that opens the album and then keeps riffing and shredding until the end of eternity. In fact, Brian May is still going “jigga-jigga-jigga-jah-jigga-jigga-jah-meedly-meedly-meedly” to this very day, and that other guy called Brian May who you’ve seen since is his clone.
➤ “Tenement Funster” – Roger “I’m just the rocker guy who sounds like Roger Daltrey” Taylor’s dark-arpeggiated-acoustic-guitar-intro-segueing-into-multi-guitar-tracked groovy bluesy hard rock contribution to the album. It does raise the question, how did Queen decide to credit this song entirely to Roger Taylor if there are the customary four-part Freddy Mercury vocal harmonies? Did Taylor write those too?
➤ “Flick of the Wrist – A slightly more theatrical song attacking greedy record executives who “reduce you to a muzak-fake machine” and has piano but is nonetheless filled with metal riffing galore.
➤ “Now I’m Here” – Big chord, KISS/UFO/SCORPIONS/SWEET/SAXON glam/boogie metal with brilliant use of layered vocals. I wonder if Sweet re-recorded “Fox on the Run” with the extra “ah-ah”s and synthesizer flourishes after hearing how much a few harmonies can improve a bone-dry hard rock recording.
➤ “Stone Cold Crazy” – Refer to the first paragraph of this review.
Even without extracting all of the metal from Sheer Heart Attack, it’s still a mostly enjoyable album. It’s just that, I prefer if the piano tunes are both short as heck, which they all pretty much are, and are between the heavier songs; the way “Lily of the Valley” connects “Tenement Funster” and “Flick of the Wrist”, or how “In the Lap of the Gods” precedes “Stone Cold Crazy”, rather than isolating and forcing them to stand on their own, like “In the Lap of the Gods… revisited”, which ends the album on a slow, non-exciting note.
But, hey, I finally got to talk about John Deacon!
A Night at the Opera (1975)
Man, I started writing these Queen reviews and then Queen Elizabeth goes and dies! I never quite understood why the British national anthem was even called “God Save the Queen.” What exactly was she being saved from anyway? Certainly not old age!
Also, being a “thick American” with no connection to the U.K., it’s weird seeing a song called “God Save the Queen” on your CD and it NOT being a three-chord punk rock song sung by a curmudgeonly British guy that’s actually bashing the queen, or subsequent covers of said song by ANTHRAX and MOTÖRHEAD.
But forget the British national anthem. That’s just a mere afterthought following the definitive, quintessential, most popular, most-loved, and nearly most overplayed Queen song of all time; you know the one I’m talking about, the one that Wayne and Garth sing in their car that goes, “I see a little silhouette-o of a man/Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango/thunderbolt and lightning/very, very frightening me/Galileo, Galileo.” It’s quite the accomplishment to turn such a deliberately pretentious and self-indulgent piece of music that’s six minutes long with non-typical song-structure and opera singing into such a huge hit and make it so damn fun; especially the head banging climax you aren’t expecting the first time you hear it. It’s like, first it’s this overly theatrical piano piece that tells the story of some guy who shot someone and threw his life away and made his mother cry, along with name dropping characters from Italian operas that no teenager gives a rat’s ass about, and then it’s got this sort of dramatic buildup, and then it just gets all heavy and rockin’.
In fact, when I was living in Los Angeles and working briefly as a water filtration system salesman with these two Mexican dudes who are a decade younger than me, we were driving around, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on the radio, and they sang it word for bloody word, right from “Is this the real thing/is this just fantasy” to “nothing really matters to me”! Well done, Queen, getting two Mexican dudes who are a decade younger than me to sing along to a pretentious, arty, semi-progressive, metal-tinged 70s rock song!
Speaking of hit singles, my man John Deacon be moving up in the world with one of Queen’s most popular songs, the sentimental soul-pop classic “You’re My Best Friend.” Meanwhile Roger Taylor is still just shouting at the top of his lungs over loud guitars, albeit with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, in his awesome, automobile fetishizing, “I’m in Love with My Car.” And Freddie Mercury has become even more obsessed with ragtime/barbershop/funny old-timey piano hall music that only people who wear bowler hats like with “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon”, “Seaside Rendezvous”, and “Good Company.” And, while I know Queen fans will kill me for saying this, but Mercury’s piano ballad “Love of My Life” is as boring as it is heartfelt. Hey, do you expect me to just unconditionally love EVERYTHING a band puts out? Conversely, I do enjoy Brian May’s bittersweet, nostalgic, “boom-ba-boom-ba” bass drum thumping folk song “’39”, which is actually about some guy who flew a hundred years into the future and then came back and nobody recognizes him, or something silly like that.
At this point, one could reasonable say that A Night at the Opera is when Queen decided that they’re a multi-genre pop/rock group rather than a hard rock or heavy metal band. However, like on Sheer Heart Attack, there are still enough metal leaning hard rock or heavy metal tunes to trick the listener into thinking Queen is still a loud rock band.
There’s the tango-metal album opener “Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…)”, in which Freddie Mercury sounds like a jilted lover until you realize the song is “dedicated to” the band’s former manager, who the group calls “a hot air balloon”, “an overgrown schoolboy”, and “a sewer rat decaying in a cesspool of pride.” Mrroooww!!! And there’s the big chord, KISS/SLADE/AC/DC heavy glam rock of “Sweet Lady.” And you have the eight-minute, mystical, tribal, stomp around the fire with loud guitars and mid-song acapella breakdown “The Prophet Song.”
In other words, you have another mostly good Queen album, barring all the boring and gay stuff.
A Day at the Races (1976)
One might get the impression that A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races are companion albums, two peas in a pod, one’s yin to the other’s yang, a pair of albums that are meant to be judged as a single entity due to both borrowing their names from a couple Marx Brothers movies and having matching cover art. And one would be wrong.
Other than these superficial qualities, and the fact that they’re both by Queen, there’s no real connection between A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. The latter is just another Queen album with a bunch of songs in various subgenres; and the lowest ratio of heavy metal or metal-leaning hard rock yet! While Brian May’s guitar still appears plenty on the album, there are exactly TWO actual ROCK songs on it. What was going on at the time with Queen and ALICE COOPER, where they knew their audience consisted of long-haired rocker kids, but they’re filling their albums with waltzes, soul, gospel, ragtime, and piano ballads? Did they think, “Oh, our fans will be too stoned to notice if we just throw on a couple hard rock songs and then just make the rest of the album for old people who wear suits!”?
And WHAT a tease! The first song is the killer sleazy glam metal “Tie Your Mother Down”, which I heard all the time on the radio when I was a kid and was surprised to learn was by Queen, because it just seemed to rock too much before I knew that Queen could rock. My God, I can only imagine some teenager buying A Day at the Races in 1976, banging his head all over creation to “Tie Your Mother Down”, and then waiting and waiting and bloody waiting for the NEXT time he’ll get to rock out again. He finally does, six songs and one side flip later, with the riff-tastic, groove-oriented “White Man”, a song that, for better or worse, virtually started the whole “white man genocided the Indians” trend in hard rock and heavy metal; giving us “Genocide” by THIN LIZZY, “Savage” by JUDAS PRIEST, “Run to the Hills” by IRON MAIDED, “Broken Treaties” by SATAN, and even “Manitou” by VENOM. At least that last one ends in a violent scalping.
And that’s it! Other than, maybe, the heavy ending to “The Millionaire Waltz”, there is no other hard rock or heavy metal on A Day at the Races! There is other stuff, though. And, believe it or not, most of the other stuff, especially the doo-wop/gospel song, “Somebody to Love”, is good! However, Freddie Mercury’s piano ballad “You Take My Breath Away” is not that good and should probably be called “You Take My Insomnia Away.” While the waltz song, cleverly titled “The Millionaire Waltz”, and the bouncy musical hall show tune, “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy”, are fun bits of nostalgic schlock, and not much else.
You also have Brian May’s lovely, bittersweet, and jangly folk-rock tune “Long Away”, which makes me feel all fuzzy inside, John Deacon’s butterflies in your stomach, feel-good romantic “You and I”, Roger Taylor’s appropriately titled, drowsy-feeling, slide-guitar filled “Drowse”, which less trained ears might mistake for a mid-70s PINK FLOYD song, and of course, May’s album closing love-letter to Japan “Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)”, which has Japanese lyrics and not much else going for it. Honesty, it’s a pretty weak album closer, and the Japanese should feel insulted that Queen would dedicate this song to them.
Man, what if Freddie Mercury was actually a fan of horse or car racing! Then you could call the fifth Queen album A Gay at the Races! But, I still wouldn’t do that, because I don’t want people to think I don’t like it.
News of the World (1977)
If I graded albums solely by their covers, then you already know I’d give News of the World a 10/10 just for using a slightly altered version of the painting of a giant robot from the cover of the October 1953 issue of "Astounding Science Fiction," which now includes the bloody dead bodies of the members of Queen scattered about. On top of that, I’d give the album an 11/10 just for being advertised in the January 1978 issue of Heavy Metal. Sadly, the giant killer robot concept goes no further than the cover and the inner gate fold, where it’s attacking the audience at a Queen concert. And the title doesn’t even make much sense, since none of the songs are about the news of the world.
But don’t be alarmed when you hit play or drop the needle and you hear that all too familiar “boom-boom-clap” sound from the overplayed and terminally lame “We Will Rock You.” I think I first heard the song in the 90s kids movie The Mighty Ducks, and I honestly thought it was just some stupid theme song made up for the movie and played at sports games. I mean, it consists of two minutes of chanting/proto-rapping over foot-stomps and hand-claps before some admittedly nice heavy guitar comes in for a few seconds at the end; it barely counts as a song, and it sounds like it was recorded by two people. And, while the next track, “We Are the Champions”, is another way overplayed song you hear at every sports game, it’s actually a good epic ballad of victory and perseverance; and I still find the line, “I’ve served my sentence but committed no crime” actually quite poignant.
Thankfully, the “wee-wee” portion of News of the World only lasts four minutes, and there are nine other songs and 35 more minutes of music for you to enjoy. I know it’s not fair to include “We Are the Champions” in the “wee-wee” portion of News of the World, since it IS a good a song and not “wee-wee”, but thank every radio programmer everywhere who insists on always playing these songs back to back as if they’re two parts of the same song for making “We Are the Champions” part of the “wee-wee” part of News of the World.
As far as I’m concerned, News of the World truly begins on the third track, Roger Taylor’s chugga-chugga-chugga punk metal beast “Sheer Heart Attack.” It’s so catchy and good! The chorus just goes, “Sheeer heart attack! Real cardiac! I feel so inar-inar-inar-inar-inar-inar-inar-inarticulate!” And, even though News of the World is just another collection of songs in different styles, there’s at least more ROCK on it than on the last album; and most of that cutesy old-timey crap that Freddie Mercury and other gay people love so much has taken a backseat to normal kinds of music that doesn’t seem like it’s made for senior citizens and gays. I say “most”, because Freddie Mercury couldn’t resist throwing in the piano lounge-y “My Melancholy Blues” at the end of the album, thus sapping out all the energy that was generated by the previous song, Brian May’s humble bragging arena cock rock metal ode to cheating on his wife while on tour, “It’s Late.” More like “It ROCKS” if you ask me! But, don’t cheat on your wife.
Meanwhile John Deacon’s two songs couldn’t be more different from one another. One is the small-town-guy-with-big-dreams power ballad “Spread Your Wings” with the piano intro and the big emotional chorus that became the catalyst for songs like “Don’t Stop Believin’.” And the other is the adorable as a big-eyed-Latina-in-a-flower-dress, Spanish guitar pop of “Who Needs You.” I LOVE this song, and it makes me all kinds of happy when I put it on. Actually, I love both of these songs, but you get the point.
There’s also an actual melancholy piano song called “All Dead, All Dead” with the especially heartbreaking line “of course I don’t believe you’re dead and gone”, which reminds you that missing people sucks. And Roger Taylor contributed a pretty good funky hard rocker called “Fight from the Inside”, which is a good enough AEROSMITH tribute. And you have the fun but generic blues song, “Sleeping on the Sidewalk.” But, without a doubt, the weirdest song on the album is “Get Down, Make Love”, with its atypical start-stop rhythm, heavy bass grooves, and little beep-boop noises. Also “Get Down, Make Love” totally reminds me of Judas Priest; not the MUSIC but Rob Halford’s singing. Think I’m nuts? I think Halford heard this song or had it in his head when he wrote and sang both the “we’ve got to make love” line in “Burnin’ Up” and the “looking for meat” line in “Grinder.”
I mean, it could just be a coincidence, but I don’t wanna go there.
Jazz (1978)
It’s hard to talk about the seventh Queen album, Jazz, without mentioning Dave Marsh’s amusingly negative review of the album from the January 1979 issue of Rolling Stone. He goes as far as to say “Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band”, which is already pretty funny, since there were, ya know, real fascist rock bands like Skrewdriver; but then he goes on to take umbrage with the fact that the album is called Jazz yet has no jazz on it. Is Marsh really that daft to not realize that they’re referring to the slang term for bullshit and not the music genre, as in “I’m sick of your jazz”? The fact that the last song is called “More of That Jazz” should have been a dead giveaway. He also complains that “Jazz is just more of the same dull pastiche that’s dominated all of this British supergroup’s work: tight guitar/bass/drums heavy-metal clichés, light-classical pianistics, four-part harmonies that make the Four Freshmen sound funky and Freddie Mercury’s throat-scratching lead vocals.”
It’s hard to talk about the seventh Queen album, Jazz, without mentioning Dave Marsh’s amusingly negative review of the album from the January 1979 issue of Rolling Stone. He goes as far as to say “Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band”, which is already pretty funny, since there were, ya know, real fascist rock bands like Skrewdriver; but then he goes on to take umbrage with the fact that the album is called Jazz yet has no jazz on it. Is Marsh really that daft to not realize that they’re referring to the slang term for bullshit and not the music genre, as in “I’m sick of your jazz”? The fact that the last song is called “More of That Jazz” should have been a dead giveaway. He also complains that “Jazz is just more of the same dull pastiche that’s dominated all of this British supergroup’s work: tight guitar/bass/drums heavy-metal clichés, light-classical pianistics, four-part harmonies that make the Four Freshmen sound funky and Freddie Mercury’s throat-scratching lead vocals.”
I WISH Queen had more “tight guitar/bass/drums heavy-metal clichés” throughout their discography, but, as it turns out, Jazz is Queen’s most rockin’ album in years; certainly more so than the last three! It’s still got the piano numbers and ballads and a music hall/vaudeville tune called “Dreamers Ball” and a dance funk song called “Fun It”, that’s like a precursor to “Another One Bites the Dust.” But there hasn’t been a frenetic, riff-filled, guitar workout like “Dead on Time” since “Brighton Rock” from Sheer Heart Attack four years earlier!
Plus a boring piano ballad like “Jealousy” sounds way more tolerable stuffed between the stomping and romping big butt rocker “Fat Bottomed Girls”, which, for what it’s worth, pre-date’s SIR MIX-A-LOT’s huge hit “Baby Got Back” about this extremely important social concern by thirteen years, and the call-and-response, start-stop, pop-culture-spewing good time fun of “Bicycle Race”; where Freddie Mercury mentions my boy John Wayne and disses Jaws or Star Wars. Damn straight, Freddie!
The album kicks off with the hilarious Arab metal song “Mustapha”, in which Freddie Mercury pounds away on his piano over a “thumpa-thumpa” beat and does his cartoonish portrayal of a Muslim cleric with all the shouts of “Ibrahim” and “Allah will pray for you” before Brian May comes in with his heavy riffs and Middle Eastern solos. And, in spite of Freddie Mercury’s having been born in Zanzibar, there’s no way I can read this as a respectful portrayal of a Muslim cleric; I just reckon such a thing wasn’t nearly as offensive in 1978 as it would be if this song came out today. Well, obviously it wasn’t, since you could have Muslims be the bad guys in action movies back then.
There’s other great stuff on Jazz as well, like the power-pop anti-music industry screed “If You Can’t Beat Them”, the just straight-up 70s blues-metal rocker “Let Me Entertain You”, which reminds me of the swinging blues-metal groove of Sabbath’s “Sabbra Cadabra”, the Beatles-esque “Leaving Home Ain’t Easy”, and the ELTON JOHN-ish, piano-driven pop-rock homage to unrestrained decadence and hedonism, “Don’t Stop Me Now”; which, in spite of the song’s jovial, good time nature, seems a bit grim considering how things turned out with Freddie Mercury.
Maybe someone SHOULD have stopped him now; ya know, so he wouldn’t die of AIDS. On the other hand, the adult contemporary soft-rock tune, “In Only Seven Days” is only good if you’re a middle-aged businessman living in a swank yet gaudy, 70s-style, art deco apartment doing a pile a of coke with a prostitute half your age. If you’re not that or not posing as that, then you’ll probably think this song is pretty dull.
And, even if you don’t like Jazz, it’s not a total waste of money, since there’s a full spread inside of a bunch of naked chicks on bikes.
Isn’t it awesome that the most sexist, female-humping cock rock metal that predates your MÖTLEY CRÜE and your FASTER PUSSYCAT were sung by a homo!
Live Killers (1979)
If I said the Queen double live album, Live Killers, was worth the price of admission for the fast, rockin’ New Wave of British Heavy Metal version of “We Will Rock You”, which has the same exact lyrics as the sucky “boom-boom-clap” version from News of the World but is otherwise an entirely different song, then I’d be lying, because Live Killers is an album and not a concert. Therefore you can’t get admitted into it; you can only buy it or steal it. On the other hand, Live Killers is certainly worth the nominal price you’ll pay, be it money or feelings of guilt, for that live version of “We Will Rock You”, which for some reason doesn’t appear on any Queen studio albums.
And this new fast heavy metal version of “We Will Rock You” is the first song! So, unless you’re a stickler for minor details, slightly different versions of great songs, which weren’t even recorded entirely live anyway, and pointless stage banter, like when Freddie Mercury tells the crowd who “Death on Two Legs” is about, and it’s bleeped out as if anyone actually cares who that song is about (it’s about their manager at the time), then really you can just turn off Live Killers after the first track; especially since Queen performs the News of the World version of “We Will Rock You” later in the concert. The fact that the “boom-boom-clap” is done with real drums and not just foot stomps and handclaps, and the song has the crowd singing along doesn’t make it any more good or any less shitty.
Otherwise Live Killers is a decent live album; and it's fun hearing Queen blast through two-minute versions of “Killer Queen”, “Bicycle Race”, and “I’m in Love with My Car” with no breaks between them, or do an extended spaced-out science fiction ambient noise breakdown during “Get Down, Make Love.” So, give it a couple listens before permanently relegating it to your shelf.
As for songs, Queen does one from Queen, four from Sheer Heart Attack, six from A Night at the Opera, one from A Day at the Races, five from News of the World, four from Jazz, the new version of “We Will Rock You”, and a big, fat ZERO from Queen II. And, while it sucks that they completely ignore their second and my favorite Queen album, they also mostly ignore A Day at the Races and their music hall/barbershop/ragtime stuff as well, making it clear that Queen are very much still a live rock band at this point, as opposed to a group of guys fiddling about with machinery in a studio and churning out pop hits. Okay, they churned out pop hits like “Killer Queen” and “Don’t Stop Me Now”, but they’re LIVE pop hits, meant to be performed LIVE. Plus they even added some metal riffs to “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
There is also a brief acoustic segment in the show, where they perform “Dreamers Ball”, “Love of My Life”, and “’39”, but it’s immediately followed by a particularly fast version of “Keep Yourself Alive”, where we get the first of two drum solos. The second one is during a particularly fast version of “Brighton Rock”, which they also extend into a lengthy jam. It also sucks they tease you with “Mustapha” but don’t actually play the song. Yeah, I KNOW it’s not listed on the back, but Freddie Mercury goes, “Iiiibrahiiim… Allah, Allah, Allah will pray for you…”, making you think they’re going to play the song, and then they play “Bohemian Rhapsody” instead. What sense does THAT make???
Holy crap! There’s a photo where Freddie Mercury actually looks like Rob Halford! I’m serious! He’s wearing suspenders, leather pants, and the leather police hat! I read in Halford’s book "Confess" that he met Freddie Mercury at some gay bar, and he was disappointed when Freddie Mercury told him that he doesn’t consider Queen to be a heavy metal band! The truth hurts, Rob. The truth bloody hurts.
The Game (1980)
Queen wasn’t available for the photo shoot for the cover for their eighth studio album, The Game, so they got their frowny-faced punk rocker buddy, their tax auditor, a cast member from Grease, and Jay Jay French from TWISTED SISTER to wear matching motorcycle jackets and pose for the cover instead.
The Game is when Freddie Mercury reinvented his image with the short hair, mustache, and signature macho gay look; even if, apparently, he never officially came out as gay. At the same time, Queen more or less reinvented themselves with a more streamlined pop-rock sound that seemed directly tailor-made to appeal to the lowest common denominator suburbanite consumers that hang out at bowling alleys, shopping malls, roller skating rinks, and local dive bars.
In other words, it’s great! But let’s get one thing out of the way; there is no metal on The Game. That’s right, there is no punk-metal/proto-thrash like “Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll”, “Stone Cold Crazy”, or “Sheer Heart Attack”; nor is there proto-power metal like “Great King Rat” or “Ogre Battle”; nor is there any sleazy glam metal like “Now I’m Here”, “Sweet Lady”, or “Tie Your Mother Down”; nor are there any riff-filled, technical guitar workouts like “Keep Yourself Alive”, “Brighton Rock”, or “Dead on Time”; nor is there any other proto-80s metal which would now be 80s metal on Queen’s first album of the 80s. Don’t get me wrong; Brian May’s guitar is still loud and proud, but all it does is play basic, major chords and a couple guitar solos on these catchy-as-hell dumbed down power-pop songs like “Need Your Loving Tonight”, “Rock It (Prime Jive)”, and “Coming Soon”; or the couple of heavy licks on the funk-rocker “Dragon Attack.”
But don’t worry, young fella, who remembers how awesome Queen was before the ball dropped on December 31st, 1979! The Game still has many of the familiar Queen elements. It opens with a big, theatrical piano rocker with some heavy chords called “Play the Game”, closes with a big, theatrical piano rocker with some heavy chords called “Save Me”, and has Brian May’s bittersweet AOR power ballad “Sail Away Sweet Sister” somewhere in between there. So, if you enjoy THOSE elements of the Queen sound, well, then you have three pretty darn good reminders of how Queen was before they started dressing like stockbrokers, lawyers, and the guys who dole out their paychecks.
On the other hand, The Game also has two of the most popular AND most atypical songs in the entire Queen discography. Those are, of course, John Deacon’s all-four-on-the-floor, disco-dance-funk, uber-hit “Another One Bites the Dust”, which has that addictive bass line you’ve heard 50 gazillion times everywhere from car commercials to standing in line at the supermarket, and Freddy Mercury’s swinging good time, pompadour-n-loafers 1950s rockabilly throwback “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”, which for some reason people think is an Elvis Presley cover; maybe they’re confusing it with “Hunk of Burning Love”? There’s also the anti-suicide doo-wop song confusingly titled “Don’t Try Suicide”, which has a message I wholeheartedly support but a delivery that’s just plain odd. I mean, what kind of line is “don’t try suicide/ you’re just gonna hate it”? As if you’d be alive to know?
But, oh, if you enjoy these ten songs and 35 minutes of music shoved into an ugly grey cover with a hilarious photo of four guys awkwardly standing around wearing motorcycle jackets that they probably borrowed for the shoot, you have no idea what treasures the 80s had in store for Queen!
Flash Gordon (1980)
And then Queen makes a HAWKWIND album. I mean, not really, because Brian May is a formalist with his strictly memorized, note-perfect classical musicianship, while Dave Brock vamps on four chords and does loosely improvised guitar solos that are never played the same way twice. But it’s certainly the closest Queen would ever get to the world of heavy space rock and psychedelic, outer space music.
It is kind of weird that Queen counts their soundtrack to the 1980 low budget cult sci-fi picture "Flash Gordon" as an official studio album. So much of it consists of spacey, wishy-wooshy, and ambient synthesizer pieces instead of full-band compositions, and every member of Queen is credited with playing the synthesizer along with his respective instrument. There are a lot of sound clips from the movie all over the album as well, which gives me the impression that maybe the group didn’t take the "Flash Gordon" project too seriously.
Flash Gordon, the album, not the movie, is 35 minutes long, consists of eighteen tracks, and maybe three of them count as actual songs. And I’m being generous by including the brief but awesome synth-rock instrumental “Football Fight” and similarly brief but great epic metal with laser sounds “Battle Theme.” On the other hand, the final track, “The Hero” is an actual song and a GOOD song, even if it incorporates that “FLASH-ahh-ahhhh!” part that already popped up throughout the album in “Flash’s Theme”, “Flash to the Rescue”, “Marriage of Dale and Ming (and Flash Approaching)”, and “Flash’s Theme Reprise (Victory Celebrations)”; and would get pretty annoying if it wasn’t so darn fun and amusing.
The bulk of the Moog-heavy synthesizer tracks and spacey, mood pieces with those very Hawkwind-sounding song titles like “In the Space Capsule (The Love Theme)”, “In the Death Cell (Love Theme Reprise)”, “Ming’s Theme (in the Court of Ming the Meciless)”, “The Ring (Hypnotic Seduction of Dale)”, “The Kiss (Aura Resurrects Flash)”, “Vultan’s Theme”, “Arboria (Planet of the Tree Men)”, and “Escape from the Swamp” were written and performed by Freddie Mercury, John Deacon, and Roger Taylor and predominantly make up the first half of the album. They’re mostly pretty good for what they are, but a couple of them do seem rather phoned in; I’m looking at you, John Deacon. You weren’t trying hard enough! The best are where the Moog is just going WOW-WOW-WOW really loudly; I think that’s one of the Freddie Mercury pieces. While Brian May’s guitar is far more prominent in the second half with pieces like “The Wedding March”, which is just wedding music, and the crunchy, metal riffing on “Crash Drive in Mingo City.”
It’s a trip to think that Flash Gordon is Queen’s first foray into the deep-dive world of science fiction themed music, considering that Hawkwind have made a whole career out of it; while experimental, “cosmic music” groups like TANGERINE DREAM, CLUSTER, and HARMONIA have made entire albums of JUST the whirring-whizzing-wishy-wooshy space noises! And Tangerine Dream has made lots and lots of albums, because, if you couldn’t already guess, it isn’t exactly HARD to make lots and lots of albums of whirring-whizzing-wishy-wooshy space noises. See, writing a melody, hook, and memorable riff, one that hasn’t been done by fifty-billion other bands, is HARD. Playing a bunch of psychedelic space tones by pushing buttons is not very hard.
Also, Hawkwind rules.
Hot Space (1982)
And here I was all ready to defend the Queen album that all the fans and critics hate because of the abrupt shift to disco, funk, R&B, and dance-pop, and Brian May goes and writes an anti-gun song called “Put Out the Fire”!!! What am I supposed to think about that? Who does that Limey bastard think he is to judge whether someone needs to own a gun or not? What about the woman living in the hood who uses a gun to protect herself from muggers and rapists? So, I thought long and hard about this and decided to give them a pass, because if they could go back on their no synthesizer policy, then they could just as easily go back on their no gun policy as well.
Well, first of all, only some of Hot Space is disco, funk, R&B, and dance-pop. It just so happens that four of the disco, funk, R&B, and dance pop tracks are crammed into the front of the album, along with one song near the end, thus giving people the impression that the whole thing is disco, funk, R&B, and dance-pop. Even so, these tracks are definitely entertaining, provided you have no problem with John Deacon playing that neat, futuristic sounding, whirring synthesizer bass, and you’re okay with songs like the dance club track with programmed drums and fake horns called “Staying Power”, the pair of rocking funk/soul tunes with Brian May playing hard edged guitar licks called “Dancer” and “Back Chat”, the smooth and sultry R&B of “Cool Cat”, and the especially gay sounding dance club number, “Body Language”, which is full of hand-claps, finger snaps, random noises, and Freddie Mercury saying “don’t talk”, “sex body”, and “body language.” Basically, if you like RICK JAMES and MICHAEL JACKSON and don’t mind some gay dance club vibes, you’ll probably enjoy these songs. On top of that, when the band played songs like “Staying Power” live, they reverted back to the regular guitar/bass/drums rock arrangement.
Other than that, however, Hot Space is just another Queen album which has six other songs in various rock and pop subgenres. In fact, that anti-gun song with the stupid lyrics about how you don’t need a gun is a loud, distorted chord, hard rock anthem, which tries to make gun-control sound bad-ass with lines like “you need a weapon like a hole in the head” (huh, huh, clever); sadly it’s the only real rocker on the album. But the song right after it, “Life Is Real (Song for Lennon)”, is another typical yet enjoyable theatrical piano-rocker with heavy guitar chords that you’ve come to expect from Queen. And, in case you were confused by the title, the song is a tribute to the former Beatle who was executed on December 8th, 1980; unlike, say, the MEATMEN song, “One Down, Three to Go”, which is not a tribute to the former Beatle who was executed on December 8th, 1980.
Hey, maybe the recent killing of JOHN LENNON was why Brian May wrote an anti-gun song! Though, according to wiki, Brian May typically votes conservative, so maybe he was just concerned that the near snipe-out of Ronald Reagan would happen to his precious Margaret Thatcher! Ahhh, to get inside of a rock musician's mind…
I guess the biggest surprise on Hot Space is a quirky, DEVO-ish new wave song with cool synth ‘n’ sax solos called “Action This Day.” How come nobody complained that Queen went new wave? Meanwhile, Roger Taylor’s catchy-as-all-hell folky acoustic rocker “Calling All Girls” sounds like the PRETENDERS. And the power ballad “Las Palabras de Amor (The Words of Love)” is kinda like “Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)”; only it’s in Spanish instead of Japanese and doesn’t sound anything like “Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together).”
But they save the best, or most popular, for last, ending with the wonderful pop-rock single of “Under Pressure.” That’s the one with DAVID BOWIE on it that has the really catchy bass line that VANILLA ICE sampled for “Ice Ice Baby” and that I heard nearly every Thursday night between 2007 and 2009 when I went to Retro Deluxe a.k.a. 80s Night at the Drink night club in Grand Rapids on a weekly basis. Thus listening to “Under Pressures” gives me fuzzy nostalgic feelings for the late 00s when I was getting fuzzy nostalgic feelings for the early 80s, giving me fuzzy nostalgic feelings twice removed. But, even if it didn’t give me fuzzy nostalgic feelings, it’s still a lovely little piece of musical pop-art that perfectly caps off an otherwise unusual album.
More 80s Queen on the way…
The Works (1984)
Man, get the fuck out of here if you don’t love the synthetic, synthesizer, programmed beatbox, yuppies-in-a-posh-dance-club-coke-snorting, DURAN DURAN, CULTURE CLUB, HUMAN LEAGUE, 80s-on-steroids dance pop opening track “Radio Ga Ga”!
It’s funny too, because The Works allegedly was Queen’s big “return to rock.” Err, I guess? I mean, it’s certainly a complete turn away from the soul, funk, and R&B of the previous album, but obviously they still enjoy synthesizers and drum machines. And, like, if you’re trying to tell your fans that you’re the old, rockin’ Queen again, it’s probably not the best idea to start your new album with “Radio Ga Ga.” But, at very least, there are no anti-gun songs on it!
The Works is a solid album and sounds like the true follow-up to The Game rather than the detours that were Flash Gordon and Hot Space. Other than the opening track, which was probably tacked on to snag the teenage girl demographic, the other eight songs on The Works sound like the streamlined, 80s Queen introduced on The Game, only heavier and with zero soul, funk, and R&B. And, I love the two cock-rockin’ heavy metal songs, even if they seem a bit simplistic compared to Queen heavy rockers of old. Both use big, blocky major chords with space between the riffs, while “Tear It Up” has that Billy Squire, BOOM-DOOF percussion, and “Hammer to Fall” sounds way too happy and celebratory to be about the cold war; even if it rocks and is probably one of my favorite Queen jams.
But The Works would have had THREE hard rock songs if they included the FASTWAY-style, bluesy-slide guitar, glam metal tune “I Go Crazy”, which they instead idiotically used as the B-side to a single. Why??? The actual album is only 37 minutes long! They could have easily slapped this four-minute song onto it! Instead, they end the album with the schmaltzy, “we are the world”, “feed the children”, “world peace”, rich-rock-star-with-a-cause acoustic ballad “Is This the World We Created…?”; dropping a solid 7/10 album to a ZERO!!!
And if you can’t decide whether you wanna dance or rock, “Machines (or ‘Back to Humans’)” let’s you do BOTH!!! It’s got the programmed beatbox AND heavy guitars!!! Isn’t that crazy??? It’s dance music AND it’s rock music!!! It’s got computerized, programmed percussion AND heavy metal power chords!!! Beep-boop sounds AND guitar solos!!! It’s like the song is the personified struggle between man and machine!!! And it’s just a good dance-rock tune too. So, feel free to consider that another hard rock song if you don’t mind the drum machine in the background.
Ah, but, what other stylistic tricks do Queen have up their sleeve this time? Well, bucko, get out the hair grease, motorcycle jacket, pressed slacks, and loafers like you did for “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”, because Queen is at it again with another rockabilly rave-up called “Man on the Prowl.” I wonder what the STRAY CATS thought of this dinosaur band steppin’ on their turf, daddio! Do these squares wanna rumble? And you also have another theatrical piano rocker with some heavy riffs that you’ve now come to expect with Queen called “It’s a Hard Life.” While “I Want to Break Free” is a fun and bouncy acoustic pop number, and “Keep Passing the Open Windows” will be stuck in your head until the end of eternity.
Like I said, it’s a decent album, other than the closing track.
More like Live AIDS if you ask me!!!
A Kind of Magic (1986)
It’s pretty ironic that the first song on A Kind of Magic is called “One Vision” when clearly there are several conflicting visions on the album. And, while the majority of Queen albums at this point are just mish-mashes of songs in different subgenres, A Kind of Magic is downright schizophrenic. I mean, who is an album like A Kind of Magic even supposed to be marketed to? Given the album’s ugly cover, which has the members of Queen as Disney cartoons surrounded by multi-colored puke, it would seem like it’s marketed to upper-middle class dentists, who decorate their mini-mansions with gaudy “modern art” and listen to Phil Collins. But if we’re talking strictly the music, I suppose there could have been a young consumer in the mid-80s whose taste was diverse enough to include STEVIE WONDER, DEAD OR ALIVE, and MANOWAR; I’m just not sure how many of such individuals existed.
And, I’m not kidding when I say that “Gimme the Prize (Kurgan’s Theme)” and “Princes of the Universe” could be Manowar songs if you put Eric Adams in the place of Freddie Mercury; this is straight-up, slamming, heavy metal with loud, powerful, epic choruses and even the same exact big drum tone that Manowar uses that sounds like Thor’s Hammer pounding on the side of a giant metal dumpster. Sadly, those are the only two songs on the album that sound like that, and the Dead or Alive-style dance club track “Don’t Lose Your Head” is stuffed right between them.
So the last third of the LP goes victorious power metal anthem/gay, electronic dance number/climactic epic power metal with build-up and super-riffy guitar work, the likes of which Brian May hadn’t done since “Dead on Time” from Jazz eight years earlier, and which also doubles as the theme song for the Highlander TV show. In hindsight, this is quite an amusing string of songs, and “Don’t Lose Your Head” has some righteous guitar work as well. So grab me my leather police cap, assless leather chaps, and leather straps--- and, I’m not kidding when I say that “Pain Is So Close to Pleasure” is just straight-up Stevie Wonder, Motown smooth R&B. It’s not bad if you like that kind of thing.
A Kind of Magic also happens to be a kind of soundtrack to the 1986 science fiction cult classic "Highlander." I say “kind of”, because, though the movie has songs from the album, some are different versions and/or mixes, and there was never an official soundtrack album released for the movie; the starkest difference between the album and soundtrack version can be heard in the two versions of “A Kind of Magic.” The one on the album is basically a MICHAEL JACKSON-style pop song, which isn’t bad, while the one in the movie has a different drum-beat and is arranged more like a rock song with some extra guitars. Several songs on A Kind of Magic also feature soundbites from the movie, but unlike Flash Gordon, the songs on A Kind of Magic stand fine on their own. Like, there’s no recurring “Highlander, ahh-ahhh!!!” theme on A Kind of Magic; they’re just nine individual songs.
Making things even more confusing (not really) is that the opening track, “One Vision”, was not in "Highlander" but in the 1986 "Top Gun" rip-off "Iron Eagle." What this means, in essence, is that Queen wrote a big major chord, 80s metal party rocker, which would have found a comfortable space on the JUDAS PRIEST album Turbo of the same year, but made it an homage to Martin Luther King, Jr. as opposed to rockin’ or screwin’ loose sluts, and then licensed it to a major Hollywood motion picture about how bad ass the U.S. air force is. God, the 80s were awesome.
In general, I can get into this multi-genre approach that tries to appeal to everyone. It’s just that “One Year of Love” and “Who Wants to Live Forever” – which obviously is quite an ironic and depressing title in hindsight – are both boring ballads with orchestral backing! Isn’t one boring ballad with orchestral backing enough? Did KISS fans ever think that Destroyer could use more songs like “Beth”? But, if it’s not boring ballads with orchestral backing, then it’s boring ballads WITHOUT orchestral backing! Okay, “Friends Will Be Friends” isn’t “boring.” In fact, it’s not a bad song at all; it just tends to blend in with “Spread Your Wings”, ”Play the Game”, “Life Is Real (Song for Lennon)”, ”It’s a Hard Life”, and all the other songs where Freddie Mercury sings while playing piano, and Brian May comes in with guitar solos and some heavy riffs; except, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, of course.
Also, check out the video for “Princes of the Universe”! It’s hilarious seeing Queen performing the song in their yuppie office attire rather than rock or metal clothes. It’s like, damn, these dentists and lawyers can sure tear it up!
The Miracle (1989)
Queen is the INSANE CLOWN POSSE of the 80s. Don’t believe me? Remember how we all had a good laugh at the makeup wearing rap duo in 2009 when they released that song “Miracles” about how all these things in nature that we take for granted are actually miracles, with such great lines as “water, fire, air, and dirt/fuckin’ magnets, how do they work/and I don’t wanna talk to a scientist/y’all motherfuckers be lyin’ and gettin’ pissed”? Yeah, Queen wrote that same song in 1989.
In case you’re wondering what the “miracle” is in the title track for The Miracle, there’s no mysterious, subtle, hidden, or cryptic message there. It’s just about the wonders of nature. The ONLY difference between the Queen song and what Insane Clown Posse sing about – well, other than cuss words and hilariously stupid lines about magnets – is that Queen say a nice ADDITIONAL miracle would be world peace. How cute.
You know what would be a REAL miracle? If Queen released a rock album; that is, an entire album with rock songs from start to finish, as opposed to an album that violently ping-pongs between awesome SCORPIONS-style loud guitar rockers like “I Want It All” and “Was It All Worth It”, catchy and passable BOBBY BROWN sexin’ up your lady, New Jack Swing R&B like “Rain Must Fall” and “My Baby Does Me”, and the kind of goofy ass mainstream pop-rock I heard all the time at that 80s night I mentioned earlier.
The joke must be on me, though, since the chorus for “Rain Must Fall” and the KENNY LOGGINS-but-slightly-heavier “Breakthru” are all stuck in my head, right? And, “Breakthru” probably strikes a chord with people who are trying to rekindle a romance that they somehow screwed up; so, it is touching, gotta say. But, hawt damn, “I Want It All” is such a great metallic hard rocker with that determined-to-win-it-all vibe that you’d probably see in a training montage in a sports movie, hence the title, and then it ends with a freakin’ THRASH BREAK. Seriously! The last part of the song gets all fast ‘n’ shit!
And, before you think I’ll just give a pass to any Queen song just as long as it’s sufficiently hard rock enough, I think the first two songs, “Party” and “Khashoggi’s Ship” are fairly forgettable exercises in throwaway riffing that basically just sound like discarded AEROSMITH songs and should have been swapped for the superior single B-side “Hang on in There.” So, there; I’m being objective, since record reviewing is about objectivity and has nothing to do with personal taste.
God, that stupid “Rain Must Fall” song is sooo stupidly catchy! And it still has darn good lead guitar work from Brian May! Is this genre called New Jack Swing, or is this just pop? I definitely know “My Baby Does Me” is New Jack Swing. I’ll have to consult my 80s pop expert buddy about these questions. Furthermore, what’s “Scandal” count as? It’s this song telling the media to buzz off, kinda like that Michael Jackson song “Leave Me Alone”, and it’s got a driving rock beat, gated drum effect, and the big, emotional chorus, like DOKKEN or Michael Jackson, but the guitars aren’t especially loud in that one, but there’s still some shredding guitar work. Is it pop? Is it metal? Is it pop-metal??? I dunno, but I like it!
Also, is it just me, or is “The Invisible Man” just the "Ghostbusters" theme with different words? Well, the verses certainly are! Seriously, you could switch “If there’s something wrong in your neighborhood” in for “When you hear a sound that you just can’t place”, and it could be the sequel to the "Ghostbusters" theme! The chorus is different, but, at that point, you’re so used to hearing the “Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!” in Ray Parker Jr.’s song that you’re totally gutted when you get the far inferior chorus “I’m the invisible man/I’m the invisible man/you can see right through me”!
You know what’s NOT on the album, though? PIANO. That’s right; not a single one of these ten songs has Freddie Mercury singing while playing his signature piano, either with or without Brian May playing some guitar along with it. There are synthesizers, keyboards, and programmed drums, but there is no piano on The Miracle. “The Miracle” does have a really corny string section, giving it that fairy tale, storybook vibe, which I guess makes sense, since the song is about, ya know, miracles, but still.
"Albums full of pop and rock, none of them of suck total cock, it’s a miracle
We write catchy songs in different styles, our later stuff is still worth-while, it’s a miracle
We don’t care that Freddie’s gay, I just wish there was a cure for AIDS, that would be a miracle."
Sorry, poor taste.
Innuendo (1991)
I wanted an album with more loud guitars, and I got an album with more loud guitars! Queen haven’t had this many rockers on a single album since Jazz from twelve years earlier! In fact, Innuendo almost seems like an apology for the 80s. I think Brian May’s then recent guest appearance on the 1989 BLACK SABBATH album Headless Cross during Sabbath’s criminally underrated Tony Martin era, specifically on “When Death Calls”, just might have rubbed off on the Queen guitarist. In general, it seems as though Innuendo is geared more towards the hard rock loving, pre-The Game Queen fans than the ones who got into Queen for “Another One Bites the Dust” or “Radio Ga Ga.”
And what Queen fans clearly want is a misty-eyed adult contemporary ballad about how great things seemed in the past called “These Are the Days of Our Live”, a gospel rock song called “All God’s People”, a synth-backed power-ballad called “Don’t Try So Hard”, and Freddie Mercury’s love letter to his cat, “Delilah”? Okay, okay, I’m stalling! Those are the things Queen fans tolerate between the stuff they actually want to hear. But, at least there’s no disco, funk, R&B, pop, and electronic dance club music! And “Don’t Try So Hard” does have some terrific melancholy guitar work; as does the song “Bijou”, which is just guitar solos and Freddie Mercury moaning over a synth track.
No, what fans actually want to hear is Freddie Mercury DYING. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about, you sick bastards; that last song, where you’re basically listening to a dying man’s final performance, the over-the-top, theatrical, melodramatic, I’m-making-my-grand-exit-from-this-stage-called-life final track, “The Show Must Go On.” If I’m to be 100% honest with y’all, it’s a good ‘n’ powerful song for its genre of, well, hard rock/heavy metal power ballads, but if I didn’t know it was recorded as Freddie Mercury was dying, it really would seem like fun but overdone schmaltz. It’s not BAD by any stretch, but it’s not the all-powerful, all-encompassing emotional experience that people make it out to be. And I could apply its “show must go on” sentiments to fifty other situations; like how, in less than a year, grunge came in and replaced the optimistic, fun-loving, unapologetically sincere music of Queen and their contemporaries with the pessimistic, fun-hating, unapologetically ironic music of NIRVANA and their copycats. But, hey, the show must go on!
The rest of the album is just rock, rock, and more bloody rock! Innuendo opens with the wicked-cool Queen kinda doing Sabbath title track with Spanish guitar bullfighting music breakdown; which basically welcomes back the old fans. After that, you get goth rock done in that theatrical Queen way with “I’m Going Slightly Mad”, the mid-tempo chugga-chugga, Queen-by-way-of-SAXON “Headlong”, the happy-go-lucky, you-drive-me-crazy-but-I-love you pop metal with programmed NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK drums “I Can’t Live with You” – the 1997 Queen Rocks version of this song sounds WAY better than this studio version, since the guitar is louder, and the drums are, ya know, real – the atmospheric, high-speed motorcycle chase music with guitar solos and zippy-whoosh freeway noises of “Ride the Wild Wind”, and the ZEPPELIN/SCORPIONS/WHITESNAKE cock-rock groove of “The Hitman.” And I fully believe that if “The Hitman” or “I Can’t Live with You” were released by the Scorpions or Whitesnake, both bands who I also love, they would be dismissed by critics as “generic hair-metal”; but since they’re by Queen, they’re considered works of brilliance, which they are. I’m not sure that’s actually the case, but it fits my narrative, so I’ll run with it.
Also Innuendo doesn’t have any piano on it.
So, there ya go. That’s Queen for you. I know, in order to be a completist and for you, the reader, to get the whole story, I need to talk about Made in Heaven and the stuff with Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert, but as far as the music that truly defined Queen, the real journey ends with Innuendo.
Made in Heaven (1995)
If Made in Heaven, the supposedly final album by Queen, wasn’t made in the shadow of Freddie Mercury’s death, it would just be another posthumously released compilation of outtakes, B-sides, uncompleted pieces, and reworked numbers from side projects that bands put out after they break up just to soak up a few more dollars from their hardcore fans. So, don’t for a second think you NEED to own Made in Heaven, and that it’s full of genre-defining gems and works of musical genius that not owning will make your Queen collection seem incomplete. Hell, the only reason I own it is because I bought the entire Queen studio discography from Amazon in three surprisingly cheap box sets, each containing five CD reissues of the group’s studio albums along with an extra disc of bonus tunes!
While perfectly fine and pleasant upon a couple cursory listens, my biggest and most obvious complaint about Made in Heaven is that most of the album is ballads, and none of them are particularly memorable. Oh, sure, some of them have Brian May coming in with that loud ‘n’ heavy distorted guitar and playing a few chords and solos, but, quite literally, except for the slightly faster “I Was Born to Love You” and parts of “It’s a Beautiful Day (reprise)” near the end, none of the album rocks; and the only other real exception to the ballad rule is the funky dance song “You Don’t Fool Me.” Well, I guess the other exception is the unlisted and untitled thirteenth track that sounds like ambient car commercial music or the entire “post-rock” genre. It’s one of those things that a more inquisitive listener like me will leave on JUST to see if anything new happens across 22 pointless minutes but never bothers to listen ever again.
But, otherwise, the other nine songs perfectly match the saccharine cover photo, a two-panel gatefold that looks like it was taken at some European countryside resort, which was probably Montreux, Switzerland, with the living members of Queen staring off at some snowy mountains on one side and a statue of Freddie Mercury with his fist raised in the air on the other. Like, yeah, yeah, I know he’s your boy, and I know he’s one of the most iconic figures in rock and pop, but like, can you bring it down a few notches? Okay, “A Winter’s Tale” gets a pass, since it’s a Christmas song, and you’re allowed to be saccharine on Christmas songs, and, furthermore, Freddie Mercury, like Michael Jackson, was doing the “We are the world”, world peace, everyone can be happy and get a long, la-de-dah kind of thing since the mid-80s, so that’s not too surprising. It’s just that those kinds of songs were always balanced out on other albums by, ya know, OTHER kinds of songs.
But, what do you expect from titles like “It’s a Beautiful Day”, “Made in Heaven”, “Mother Love”, and “Heaven for Everyone”? I thought “Let Me Live” might be some kind of angry rock song about a guy telling people to leave him alone and let him live, but it’s a slow, soft, and sappy ballad with some gospel choir backup vocals. And you can probably guess what I thought “Too Much Love Will Kill You” COULD be about. Alas it’s not about that.
Also, isn’t it kind of ironic that they’d included a song called “My Life Has Been Saved”?
I’m going to hell.
Return of the Champions (+ Paul Rodgers) (2005)
Assuming that, by “the champions”, they mean Queen, which they do -- since the title for the two-hour-and-ten-minute-long double live CD and DVD, Return of the Champions, is a direct reference to “We Are the Champions” -- how is having Brian May and Roger Taylor but no John Deacon, along with a trio of nobodies on second guitar, keyboards, and bass, and the singer of FREE, BAD COMPANT, and THE FIRM in place of FREDDIE MERCURY a “return of the champions”?
This is not Queen. It’s not “Queen + Paul Rodgers.” It’s just Brian May, Roger Taylor, PAUL RODGERS, and three session musicians making money by playing a bunch of Queen songs, along with two songs by Free, two songs by Bad Company, a song called “Last Horizon” from Brian May’s first solo album Back to the Light, an entirely forgettable song called “Reaching Out” from a Brian May/CHARLIE WATTS/Paul Rodgers/other people project to help disadvantaged kids or some shit, and “Say It’s Not True”, which Roger Taylor wrote for Nelson Mandela’s whole AIDS thing, and is worth every cent you’ll pay for the free download.
But, in spite of the deceptive billing and a couple lousy songs, Return of the Champions is a whole heck of a lot of fun, if only because you get to hear Paul Rodgers, who replaced Freddie Mercury’s theatrical gestures and operatic singing with brawny, bluesy, barrel-chested MANLINESS, singing classic Queen tunes. Specifically, they do five from A Night at the Opera, two each from News of the World, The Game, The Works, and Innuendo, and one each from A Day at the Races, Jazz, A Kind of Magic, and The Miracle.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that Paul Rodgers sounds right at home on good ol’ fashioned fist-pumping, cock-metal rockers like “Tie Your Mother Down”, “Fat Bottomed Girls”, “Hammer to Fall”, and “I Want It All”, or the idiotic, impossible to ruin “boom-boom-clap” rap-singing of “We Will Rock You”; which, of course, seeing as “Queen + Paul Rodgers” is nothing more than a glorified bar/tribute band, go perfectly well with Bad Company and Free songs like “Feel Like Makin’ Love”, “Can’t Get Enough”, “Wishing Well”, and “All Right Now.” Though, “All Right Now” sounds really awkward coming after a theatrical and melodramatic song like “The Show Must Go On”, where Rodgers REALLY doesn’t fit; he does those soulful inflections you hear female soul singers do when they sing the American national anthem before a baseball game.
The same goes for “We Are the Champions”; it’s like he’s deliberately singing entirely different vocal patterns and melodies to emphasize that he’s Paul Rodgers and not Freddie Mercury. And he misses all kinds of notes on “Bohemian Rhapsody”, but thankfully most of that song is handled by Freddie Mercury’s pre-recorded vocals; which I honestly think was a last-minute decision they made when they realized that there’s no way Rodgers could do justice to the definitive Queen song by himself.
I was actually more curious how Paul Rodgers would sound on some of the disco-funk and pop numbers like “I Want to Break Free”, “A Kind of Magic”, “Radio Ga Ga”, and “Another One Bites the Dust”, which don’t fit his meat-and-potatoes blues rock sensibilities. And he sounds good, considering that these songs are all given a heavier live rock vibe, and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” gets stripped of all novelty rockabilly kitsch and basically just turned into a blues song. Rodgers also sounds pretty good on “Love of My Life” and “These Are the Days of Our Lives”, but those are slow and boring ballads, so who cares.
Unsurprisingly Brian May’s “’39” and Roger Taylor’s “I’m in Love with My Car” sound exactly like “’39” and “I’m in Love with My Car”, since they’re sung by Brian May and Roger Taylor.
But Return of the Champions clearly wasn’t enough to satisfy the artistic whims of “Queen + Paul Rodgers”! No, they had to see their vision through to its completion!
So they made a mediocre studio album.
The Cosmos Rocks (+ Paul Rodgers) (2008)
Brian May has already released a few albums with different musicians. So how is The Cosmos Rocks any more of a Queen album than any of Brian May’s solo albums or his albums with singer KERRY ELLIS; other than it has Roger Taylor playing drums? I’m guessing they thought the name May, Taylor, and Rodgers wasn’t going to move units and didn’t want to take a gamble on a NEW band name, so they went with the really awkward moniker “Queen + Paul Rodgers.” It’s like they’re saying The Cosmos Rocks is a Queen album but it’s not really a Queen album. And the sad thing is they could have called themselves any old stupid name, like the Flaming Toilets from Outer Space or the Nuclear Diarrhea Assassins, and all they had to do to sell it was slap a sticker on the front that says “featuring Brian May and Roger Taylor from Queen and Paul Rodgers from Free, Bad Company, and the Firm.” I mean, did Audioslave call themselves “Rage Against the Machine + Chris Cornell”? One of my friends saw this CD and asked, “Where’s the fourth member?” Where, indeed.
And obviously Paul Rodgers sounds nothing like Freddie Mercury; in fact, Brian May tailored his guitar playing towards a more blues rock style in lieu of the more typical classically oriented playing Queen fans are used to. But just because The Cosmos Rocks isn’t a real Queen album doesn’t mean that this grouping of aging legacy rockers can’t make a more than decent 70s throwback, blues rock, and/or hard rock album.
It also doesn’t mean they can. I’d love to say The Cosmos Rocks is as good as other similar collabs, like Fused by TONY IOMMI and GLENN HUGHES or Edge of the World by GLENN TIPTON, JOHN ENTWISTLE, and COZY POWELL, but neither Fused nor Edge of the World has a song as nauseating as “We Believe.” Even if it wasn’t intended to be a pro-Obama song, which I highly doubt, considering the timing and the message about needing “a hero to boldly step from the shadows” to “match the tide of changes” and “make peace with every nation”, it’s still an overly sincere ballad about needing “a hero to boldly step from the shadows” to “match the tide of changes” and “make peace with every nation.”
Aside from that, though, The Cosmos Rocks really wouldn’t be half-bad if it just had a few more jamming 70s rock songs on it. It was never destined to be the most innovative CD in the world, but it starts off fine with “Cosmos Rockin’”, just a dumb, fun, bluesy rock ‘n’ roll song that you’d, obviously, more likely expect to hear from Free or Bad Company rather than Queen. And songs like that are sprinkled among the fourteen-track, hour long CD. There’s the groovin’ MONTROSE-style “Still Burnin’”, which (big sigh) uses a sample of the “boom-boom-clap” from “We Will Rock You”, an anti-war, acoustic/electric rocker with marching drums called “Warboys”, another heavy groove, blues rock number called “C-lebrity” (why not just “Celebrity”?), and another middle-upper tempo boogie hard rock song complete with bluesy harmonica and bits of synth and piano called “Surf’s Up… School’s Out.”
Even the OTHER overly sincere and optimistically-looking-to-a-bright-future-of-utopia-and-sunshine song “Time to Shine”, with its little piano tinkling and bits of hard-edged riffing isn’t bad, and neither is the introspective ballad “Small” or the simple and stupid, yet surprisingly catchy lazing-in-the-sunshine acoustic rocker “Call Me.” But, man, that stretch of songs in the second half, “Voodoo”, “Some Things That Glitter”, “Through the Night”, and Roger Taylor’s AIDS song, “Say It’s Not True”, are booooring! Okay, yes, it’s broken up in the middle by “C-lebrity”, which isn’t even the best rock song on the album, and the song “Voodoo” is more of a slow and sexy song for doin’ it than a ballad, but I personally feel that the second half of the album is the reason people listened to The Cosmos Rocks all of once before selling it on amazon. It also doesn’t help that they reprise “Small” at the end. Like, we heard it once. It was okay. We don’t need to hear it again.
But all the disappointments and missed opportunities of The Cosmos Rocks by “Queen + Paul Rodgers” could not prepare fans for the atrocity that followed…
Live Around the World (+ Adam Lambert) (2020)
More like Adam LAMEbert if you ask me! Actually, not really…
I was honestly geared up to write a hilariously scathing review of Live Around the World by the latest incarnation of Queen, which is called “Queen + Adam Lambert”, but, hey, Adam Lambert sounds okay! It’s pretty trendy in hard rock/classic rock/heavy metal circles to dunk on Adam Lambert, because he was a runner-up on American Idol, and because he released a bunch of cheesy pop albums full of songs that were written by five different people – especially when, as the meme points out, Freddie Mercury wrote the masterpiece “Bohemian Rhapsody” all by his lonesome – but, at the end of the day, if this is not really Queen we’re talking about but just a Queen cover/tribute band, then Adam Lambert sounds no worse than a typical late 70s/early 80s AOR singer like Steve Perry, Bobby Kimball, or Joe Lynn Turner; not exceptionally distinct, but singing the songs with enthusiasm and hitting all the notes. It’s pretty ironic too, because Lambert’s whole shtick is that he’s over-the-top, flamboyant, and, well “fabulous”, but if you never knew what Adam Lambert looked like, you’d think he’s some ugly 70s singer with a big nose or a bushy mustache! Except on the hedonistic piano pop-rocker “Don’t Stop Me Now”, where he sounds like Elton John.
But let’s put this in perspective; Brian May and Roger Taylor let Adam Lambert sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” by himself. Yet, when Queen performed the song with Paul Rodgers, they had to use a pre-recorded Freddie Mercury vocal track, because, it seems, Paul Rodgers couldn’t carry the song on his own. So, clearly Lambert is a better fit for Queen than Paul Rodgers, even if nobody can really replace Freddie Mercury. On the other hand, for some reason, this time around Queen decided to end “Bohemian Rhapsody” before the “I see a little silhouette-o of a man…” part. I have no idea why, since “Bohemian Rhapsody” is meant to be enjoyed as a complete work, and chopping off the opera parts and the big heavy metal ending, where everyone starts banging their heads is, well, pretty damn lame!
Otherwise Live Around the World is a fairly typical live album, where Brian May, Roger Taylor, Adam Lambert, the same keyboardist who was on Return of the Champions, a different bassist from the one on Return on the Champions, an extra percussionist, and this time no second guitar player perform a nice ‘n’ predictable set of Queen classics without, of course, the added burden of playing Free and Bad Company songs. Yeah, I know that Live Around the World is actually compiled from several performances between 2014 to 2020 from “around the world”, but it sounds like a single concert, so whatever. Specifically, you get four songs from The Works, two each from A Night at the Opera, News of the World, Jazz, and The Game, one each from Sheer Heart Attack, A Day at the Races, Hot Space, A Kind of Magic, Innuendo, and Made in Heaven, and a non-album track called “Love Kills – The Ballad” from another Queen compilation called Queen Forever, that I didn’t feel like reviewing, since it’s otherwise just alternate versions of songs you’ve already heard.
And, man, the different audiences around the world LOVE “Queen + Adam Lambert” so much, you can hear the crowd singing along to various songs. Though, it seems rather strange that Lambert dedicated “Who Wants to Live Forever” to the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting. I mean, I would imagine the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting wanted to live at least past that horrifying night! But, the other fun part of an album like Live Around the World is just comparing how two different singers handle the same songs.
On disco-funk and pop songs like “Another One Bites the Dust”, “I Want to Break Free”, and “Radio Ga Ga”, which sound closer to their original versions than they did with Paul Rodgers, it’s hands down Adam Lambert, and unlike Rodgers, Lambert brings some of the 50s rockabilly kitsch back to “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” as well. Not to mention that Lambert does a terrific job on several classics that Paul Rodgers didn’t sing; the harmony laced glam-metal “Now I’m Here”, the doo-wop gospel “Somebody to Love”, the overly dramatic curtain call “The Show Must Go On”, which I was never that fond of in the first place, and the song with the catchy bass line that Vanilla Ice sampled and was originally recorded with David Bowie “Under Pressure” are all more than passable, in fact quite enjoyable, with Lambert on the mic. But “Love of My Life” is going to be slow and boring no matter who sings it.
As for other rockers like “Fat Bottomed Girls”, “Tear It Up”, and “Hammer to Fall”, and the still not very good rap-sing sports anthem with that stupid “boom-boom-clap” beat “We Will Rock You”, you could flip a coin; these are ROCK songs. All you need to make them sound good is have a singer who can shout on key. Also, oddly enough, Adam Lambert sings “We Are the Champions” the same way as Paul Rodgers, with the same annoying soulful vocal inflections that weren’t in the original and kinda ruin the song. But I ain’t gonna lie. If I was there, and I heard Lambert doing these songs, I’d have had a great time, even if I’m screaming along with a bunch of Adam Lambert fans or posers who discovered Queen through that biopic that I refuse to watch.
Initially I found it amusing that Queen attempted to record a new album with Adam Lambert before scrapping their efforts. “Ha”, I scoffed, “Lambert is used to his little team of writers and producers, but when it’s time to throw down with a REAL band, he can’t hang!” But, now, after hearing Lambert on Live Around the Word, it’s a little a disappointing that we won’t be getting a new album Queen album any time soon; even if it’s by the fake Queen.
Then again, Brian May and Roger Taylor could just find themselves another singer!
Edwin Oslan
Revenge of Riff Raff
8th October, 2022
Edwin Oslan
Revenge of Riff Raff
8th October, 2022
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