Following the release of their previous album “Hear in the Now Frontier”, the episode on which you can find on Season 2 of this podcast, things had begun to be on a downturn for the band. That album had featured a very stripped back sound that resembled the grunge movement, but given it was well after that scene had moved on it had a lot of trouble resonating with the fan base, who had been used to their progressive metal, twin guitar, hard and heavy attack in previous years. A month into that tour, lead vocalist Geoff Tate had fallen seriously ill, and many concerts had to be cancelled as a result. At the same time, their record company went broke, which meant that the band had to self-fund the remainder of their tour to get it completed. And then, to top it all off, as the tour came to its conclusion, guitarist Chris DeGarmo announced that he was leaving the band. This was the final blow. DeGarmo was a highly regarded member of the group by the fan base and was a heavy contributor to the writing of all of the albums to this point of the band’s career. Burnout was cited as a reason for his departure, as well as a desire to do something else away from the music scene, which he did by becoming a professional airline pilot. His replacement was Kelly Gray, who had been the guitarist in Geoff Tate’s pre-Queensryche band Myth. Gray had also worked as a producer, a role he along with the rest of the band filled for their first album together. We also had a situation where, for the first time, all of the songs written and composed for the album were collectively credited to the band as a whole. Was this to avoid any pressure on the writers of each track, to compare them against the efforts of the songwriter who had just left the band? Whether everyone contributed equally to the process could be questioned given events some years in the future, but the result is that the band lived and died together on the basis of these songs, and their success or otherwise.
From the outset this appears to be a continuation of what was served up for us on “Hear in the Now Frontier”. There is a healthy dose of a revamped or upgraded grunge sound rumbling throughout the album, but without the true inspiration that came from that scene a decade earlier. And given that Queensrÿche the band hails from Seattle you can understand how that has eventually developed into the music that they have created here. For the first half of the album, everything is of a mid-to-slow tempo, lacking any real fire or attitude. There are no scorching guitar solos, there are no breakout drum rolls, there is no real stretching of the vocal cords. There are touches of Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth and Soundgarden through the opening tracks like "Falling Down" and "Sacred Ground", along with repeated chorus lines that fail to ignite any passion or determination to sing along because the songs are so structured and similar all the way through that it is difficult to get enthused by it. Even without DeGarmo at the helm, the songwriting here sticks to the direction taken by the previous album. "One Life" bumbles along at a morbid pace with a morbid sound, sucking all the joy out of life as it plods along. Where is the motivation? There is barely any discernible difference between this song and "When the Rain Comes". Same tempo, same dull lifelessness, with only a barely energetic solo to break up the boredom. Whereas the opening two tracks could be considered to have an alt-rock sound, these follow ups have little to offer the fan of this band.
The Soundgarden-esque "How Could I" follows this, though comparing this washed out lacklustre song to one of a band whose energy never subsided would be an aberration. You really have to ask yourself where it all goes from here. But there is more to come, as "Beside You" almost brings the album to a complete halt. How many songs can you write and perform that simply have his slow, mournful backbeat of guitars, and sad drum beat and the vocals moaning over the top in an indulgent faux-angst tone that does nothing more than bore the listeners slowly to death?
Into the second half of the album, and there is a spark of energy that comes to the fore and finds a way to bring some enthusiasm back into some of the tracks. “Liquid Sky” is lifted by Tate’s vocals and a slightly more positive musical output. “Breakdown” and “Burning Man” both suffer from the whiny guitar riff throughout the song like a poor man’s Stone Temple Pilots or Soundgarden, driven by the perpetual motion of Scott Rockenfield’s drumming. I mean, are they average songs, or just monotonously dull? Take your choice. At least they move forward rather than stagnate. “Wot Kinda Man” and the album closer “The Right Side of My Mind” all sit in a similar mode. And that is something that is not only difficult to explain because it feels and sounds as though I am portraying this album to be a collection of songs that all sound the same and in a less than entertaining way, but also because that is EXACTLY what it is!
I think you get the idea, without me using similar such metaphors for the songs on this album. There is nothing here to grab you, to hook you, to move you. Everything is so similar throughout, without any interesting lyrics or vocals, or guitar riffs or drum rolls. It is yet another massively disappointing release from a band that I had so much respect and admiration for a decade earlier.
I have talked at length on this podcast over a dozen episodes or more about the path taken by once great metal bands of all genres, and how they change and try to adapt to the 1990’s, for the most part without success. Cue Queensryche for another spiel on this matter. Their first four albums are all different and yet retain the basis of the sound that the band became famous for. Their next three albums, to the release of this album, all head down a completely different path, directed by the musical trends of the 1990’s, and for me at least, suffer immensely for it. I’m sure there are fans out there who disagree with this sentiment, but you cannot argue the vast difference in sonics from those first albums to these albums, and “Q2K” in particular.
I hesitated to buy “Q2K” when it came out, because I had splashed out my hard-earned money on the previous two albums for little reward, and at that point in my life money was tight, not something I could just throw at an album that may not cut the mustard. About 12 months after its release, I decided to take the plunge and check it out. Suffice to say it was a major disappointment, another album of the age that the band had changed their style to fit a perception of what they felt was required to continue to be relevant, and it did the opposite. Then came the time to do this anniversary episode. When I did my episode on “Hear in the Now Frontier” I found that I actually could find some good in that album that I had not had before, so I was hoping that when I came to “Q2K” I would find something similar. Well, the past two weeks has seen me listen to this album over a dozen times, for the first time since I reviewed it for my blog sometime in the past decade. And all it did was reinforce what I thought then, and definitely thought 25 years ago – that this album really doesn’t have a lot going for it.
This was the only album that Kelly Gray was involved in. He probably thinks that is a good thing overall. Without wanting to give the plot away, the next decade for Queensryche became even murkier than it had already become, and a once great and popular band found that they were unable to reconnect to their fan base with the direction the ship was steering. In effect, this is not Queensryche’s worst album. That horrific effort is still yet to come.
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