Sunday, August 05, 2012

637. Queensrÿche / Halfway Jam 28-7-2012 [Bootleg]. 2012. 4/5

After all of the bickering, after all of the bad blood, after all of the court injunctions over who owned the rights to names and music and so forth... finally, it came back to the music. This bootleg album records the first official performance of Queensrÿche with new singer Todd La Torre, and for that alone it is an historical and significant recording.

The setlist is pretty much confined to all of their album up to 1991's Empire, songs that the band portion of Queensrÿche had claimed that Geoff Tate had no interest in ever revisiting. Whether that is accurate or not, the performance of these classic tracks gives La Torre a perfect opportunity to show off his wares to his new band's fan base. What it proves is that he has a pretty fair set of pipes, and his vocals are not unlike his predecessor, which while it may be limiting in some ways probably doesn't hurt him in this instance.

This is a particularly good audience bootleg of a B+ standard. While the vocals may be a little down in the mix, it still is good enough to appreciate both La Torre's vocals along with the performance of the band itself, and both are excellent. La Torre in particular makes very few key errors, and as a live performance it is excellent.
In the long run, it is great to hear Queensryche as a band can still play. Their most important duty from ll of the turbulence of the last few months will be to prove that they can indeed live up to their end of the bargain, and go back to writing material like what they have played on this bootleg. It has been the fans' biggest bugbear in the last 15 years. Now that the band itself believes they have identified what the problem was, they have to prove they are as good as their word.

The playlist here is as follows:

01 Intro (1:23)
02 Queen Of The Reich (4:18)
03 Speak (4:23)
04 Neue Regel (4:48)
05 Walk In The Shadows (3:39)
06 En Force (5:19)
07 I Don't Believe In Love (4:42)
08 Child Of Fire (5:56)
09 The Whisper (3:54)
10 Warning (4:52)
11 Spreading The Disease (4:28)
12 The Needle Lies (3:29)
13 Prophecy (4:06)
14 Take Hold Of The Flame (4:56)
15 My Empty Room (1:48)
16 Eyes Of A Stranger (6:44)
17 Empire (5:34)
18 Encore Break (2:58)
19 Wrathchild [Iron Maiden cover] (3:09)
20 Jet City Woman (5:51)
21 Roads To Madness (10:35)

Download link can be found here : http://turbobit.net/j72id6nsxsb4.html

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