Simple answer... it’s like listening to a lounge club act. Is it a truly bad album? No, the musicianship and vocals are as good as ever. But it is so radically different from what I love from this band.
It’s just one of those things. 20 years ago, Def Leppard made a permanent move away from heavy music to begin producing the sugar-coated syrupy stuff they have recorded from Slang onwards. There was no pretence on their part. As a band they just decided that this was the music that they wanted to produce, and you either liked it, or complained about it, or moved on. Queensryche has been on a similar path for over a decade themselves, though it has been disguised a little more over the course of several albums. With this release however, they have completed that journey, and again, as with Def Leppard, there is no pretence.
This is almost a grunge album, more than a decade after this type of music really began to phase out. There are no super solos, there is none of the brilliant intricate drumming that Scott Rockenfield is renown for. There are no super soaring vocals from Geoff Tate. Every song blends into the next. On the first five or six times that I listened to the album, I truly did not know where one song ended and the next started.
I think this needs to be approached from a different angle if you are to get anything out of it. Those who listen to this without any ideas of the history behind the band may well find they enjoy it. Fans of the band who are able to roll with the punches and accept that this is the final direction that this band has headed may also be able to find some goodness in it. Many old school fans will be enormously disappointed.
I guess all I can reiterate as a personal valuation is this; technically in musicianship and mixing, this album sounds great. For someone who still believes that Operation: Mindcrime is one of the five best albums ever recorded, this may as well have been a Coldplay album. And I hate Coldplay with a passion. Et tu Queensryche? Et tu...
