Pleasant Treats & Lost Cookies

[abigailat]

For those few times when I get really bored, I'll come here and review something. I don't plan on organizing this very well. I'm only doing albums that I own, so if the choices seem flat, blame my income and the Wal-Mart/Best Buy/Half Price Books music selection. Other than that, enjoy~.

Released in 1973

Track Listing

Keep Yourself Alive

Doing All Right

Great King Rat

My Fairy King

Liar

The Night Comes Down

Modern Times Rock 'N' Roll

Son And Daughter

Jesus

Seven Seas Of Rhye...

When talking to Queen fans, you may notice that their first album is often looked over in favor of stuff like Queen II or A Night at the Opera for very unjustifiable reasons. I mean, there's nothing on Queen that isn't found on "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "The Seven Seas of Rhye"(different from this album's "Seven Seas of Rhye...") or the like. If you ask me, I'd say that all of those elements are -- in the long run -- presented better here on Queen. But I guess my opinion doesn't really matter seeing as it's on some internet music forum and not in some wildly popular music resource like Rolling Stone or Q. However, Rolling Stone and Q do in fact agree with me on Queen(or I agree with them, if you'd prefer, even though I don't read them). RS in particular, as they are long-time Queen haters but don't have many negative things to say about this album(maybe once Queen started to get bigger than them, they tried to influence the public or something by pretending to hate them >_>). The point is though, don't listen to Queen fans because they're usually idiots who laze around in bed all day, eating Cheetos and putting "Flash Gordon" on infinite repeat and rather listen to crap like News of the World instead of Nevermind the Bollocks or something. Queen is a good album.

At the time this album was being recorded, Queen were probably as self-indulgent as they could get(Queen II may have been the actual peak, but...) and were really going crazy with putting stuff in this album. They probably had enough ideas in this to constitute for several albums and not just one, with each song having a number of "movements". And all of the guitar overdubbing... damn. Each track seems to have it's own complex arrangement(I seem to remember somebody saying that it sounded "neo-classical, but I wouldn't say that exactly) and the whole thing seems to really come together nicely. And it's all very rewarding. Think of A Night at the Opera as being Queen's bastard child.

Queen aren't known for being a "heavy" band, but Queen is in fact pretty heavy for something from the early 70's and them being Queen in general. "Great King Rat" definitely has some heavy metal aspects stuck in it and "Keep Yourself Alive" harbors an almost obligatory Led Zeppelin comparison(I'm not the only one that compares bits of Queen to Led Zeppelin it seems, but others use much larger portions of this album when they do it). But while they're rocking harder than they ever could, they still make time for pop-ish bits and ballads, but even those have a tendency to lapse over into something "heavy". They're self-indulgent bastards~. Which makes me wonder if they know that this album suffers from being bombast, but being bombast is something that makes it work. If they weren't being so ostentatious, we wouldn't be getting the whole complex album that we did. Too bad they wer enever that good with lyrics ("Great King Rat died today/Born on the twenty first of May/Died syphilis forty four on his birthday/Every second word he swore/Yes he was the son of a whore/Always wanted by the law")

Queen to me comes off to me as being a generally strong release. While not being as consistent as something like Their Satanic Majesties Request, it's a whole lot more satisfying, as it's a lot more accessable and has a lot more hooks. Nothing trippy, nothing tedious... Just straight out rock. Straightforward rock. It'll definitely have you listening from beginning to end, even through dampers like "Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll". Check it out.

Other interesting cuts include: "Doing All Right", "My Fairy King", "Liar" and "Jesus"

7.5/10

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And on the sixth day, God created man. But seven days earlier, he created the Rolling Stones

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