Artist: Queensrÿche
Label: Roadrunner Records
Release: 2011
Length: 70:51
Rating: 4.5/5
What is there even left to say about a band that has sold over 20 million studio albums in its career, cracked the top ten, and conquered the world’s stages alongside the likes of Metallica, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses, Kiss, Iron Maiden and Dream Theater? Those facts alone pretty much say it all: Queensryche haven’t had anything left to prove to the wider music crowd for a good while now.
Queensryche have always been seen as musical innovators, open to bringing in fresh experimentation. Nobody ever accused them of lacking guts. The trouble only started when everyone demanded a rehash of “Operation Mindcrime” and “Empire”. The band’s baptismal blessing or curse, depending on how you look at it, lies above all in the fact (probably a unique historical phenomenon in rock) that Queensryche rose out of the early days of American speed metal (Fates Warning, for example, were an early twin brother of sorts) and kept the definition of the guitar phrase “in the metal sense” clearly built in even on “Promised Land”, even though they had long, long since stopped playing “pure” metal (from 1986 on, no more). That means that in the eighties they won the majority backing of a loyal metal audience. But once you betray that loyalty, you really do fall out of favor. All those metal fans who put “Operation Mindcrime” at the top of the menu of the Queensryche discography, with its clear step away from metal toward art rock (which is already controversial enough on that point alone), still aren’t willing to sacrifice a smidgen of the flexibility of their gray matter to grasp that Queensryche’s expressive range outgrew the confines of metal ages ago. Queensryche are a band that can reach into any genre and beyond. Into a fusion of the different genre forms of the musical universe. They really don’t do limits, and don’t want to. Yep. You may already be guessing it, and it’s true. What we have here is an experimental and diverse album, easily the most successfully put together of the post “Hear In The Now Frontier” era. Provocation, then, is Queensryche’s other name.
This is an album that needs time to settle in, so expect to spin it several times. And of course you listen to it on headphones, because it comes with top-notch production, with many sonic collages blending into each other, and you’ll be pulling back their veils for a long time while you enjoy what this album has to offer. If you’re not ready to give the album a bit of your time, better not to bother with it. It’s extremely deep and, as such, more demanding. But once it touches even the most remote corners of the listener’s soul with that depth, sticking with it is richly rewarded.
If you skim the track list of the version of “Dedicated To Chaos” with the added bonus tracks, you’ll notice that the album’s running time nearly fills the entire CD. And this time it’s truly incredible that there isn’t a single track on the album you could call “filler”, a thief of running time, or, to put it nicely, a “headache”. Every touch of arrangement on this album has its purpose, because we can instantly pick out the constant presence of Queensryche’s unique musical character, their eclecticism breathed into even the boldest, most provocative tinkering with musical experimentation, so every experimental move holds up with full credibility. There’s also a moment of courage and curiosity that, with the default solutions of experimental tinkering, would almost have backfired. I’m talking about the track Wot We Do, which a few small tweaks by any musician could send straight into dub/hip-hop territory, yet the band masterfully turned the whole situation to their advantage with touches of experimentation and won themselves another little victory. And in the end it becomes clear why the band put four bonus tracks on the album. It also becomes clear why they chose to place them in the middle of the running order. The guys simply realized their quality, which doesn’t lag behind the regular tracks of the new album in any way. Here too the band surprises with the remarkable freshness of its new musical ideas, so these tracks don’t even need the “bonus” label.
It may also sound provocative that on the new album Queensryche carried over the charisma of past albums, even the ones from their golden age that define the sound and style of the two most successful ones, into a vividly expressive mosaic of tracks, the likes of which we’ve never experienced from the band. Yep. The springboard is the excellent predecessor “American Soldier”, but with the fundamental difference that this time Queensryche cut loose from all constraints, including in how they conceptualize the message, which let the band fully unfold creatively and set off toward new horizons of music-making. It’s all here. The only difference is that it shows up differently today than it used to. All the Queensryche elements. Including the perfection of Geoff Tate’s delivery of the verses, which, in his steady standard of theatrical interpretation steeped in subtlety, keeps the top spot as the first face of Queensryche artistry. The new album no longer has that deliberately “smeared” feel of the band’s Seattle origins; the collages are knitted together with more sonic control, yet they keep all of their dynamics and spectral depth.
Queensryche have always been famous for the grip of their compact rhythmic structures. On every production, at every point of their artistic maturing. And that element is significantly emphasized on the new album in particular. An integral part of the arrangement structure of the songs themselves, which gives major support to Geoff’s multifaceted vocals as he strings together moods, this time falls in the lion’s share to the rhythm tandem of Eddie Jackson and Scott Rockenfield. The dreamy, moody closer Big Noize is the best direct indicator of this album’s principle. It has a rich sonic dimension, contrasting Tate’s one-of-a-kind delivery with a lively, warm-sounding rhythm line, with top-notch melodic use of vocal articulation. Woven into this fabric are guitars as extra melodic filler, which successfully pin down the dramatic, theatrical, almost psychedelic mood of the last track. A one-of-a-kind blend full of eclecticism, the fruit of exceptional artistic maturity and a multilayered grasp of music, yet at the same time of the band’s clearly profiled, unique art rock stance, with a markedly progressive essence on the new record.
This intensification of the rhythm section’s work surfaces through the running time of the album in different doses, and you can feel it pulsing at full strength, standing out in the production at every moment. Get Started, with its voluminously thickened bass legs, is a straight-up rock moment on the album that instantly sketches the picture of Queensryche’s new-era art rock. Hot Spot Junkie spills over after two and a half minutes into an instrumental stretch of guitar work that’s not hard to connect with the tricks of “Operation Mindcrime”. Michael Wilton at work, naturally. Got It Bad is downright cheekily danceable, with rhythms of a typical funk design. A very successful flirt with pop elements, in other words. If you could stomach Gonna Get Close To You, you’ll handle Got It Bad even more easily. Around The World is a hit candidate. A track with a solid rhythmic grip and polished melodiousness, something Queensryche carry around in their little finger, it’s just that over the course of their career this power has shown up in different musical forms. A great track with strictly positive vibes. Next comes the first moment on the album with higher experimental content. A saxophone joins in, even a Hammond, and now and then a guitar riff cuts through in layers! Higher. A track that blends demanding rhythmic textures, with a totally unpredictable course of events and a middle instrumental section that touches on elements of jazz. The track soars on a literally progressive charge, in the true sense of that adjective. Higher is also interesting for its outro. The ending unfolds chaotically, perfectly in line with the exit trick of chaotically blending shouts that was used long ago in Eyes Of A Stranger, with a closing detonation: “Revolution”! Here again is the more intensely rasping Retail Therapy, which eases the demands of the previous track, and right after it comes a new peak of the album in the fiercely dark At The Edge, which brings an extraordinary combination of homegrown rhythmic undercarriage carrying a great curtain of sampling, a palette of freely floating guitar chords, and a fascinating integration of a saxophone solo that relieves the cataclysmic state. Broken, tagged “bonus”, contains Geoff’s already once-used trick of delivering “Hush, hush”, even though this ballad with its dark veil is light-years away from Silent Lucidity. Right after it comes an excellent “bonus” track and another ballad, Hard Times, built entirely on organic collages and with a completely different atmosphere compared to the gloomy Broken. Drive isn’t a cover of the hit by The Cars, but it once again raises the adrenaline level of rock rush on the album. This track has a pinch of eighties post punk wit, though through the eclecticism of Queensryche’s approach that’s barely noticeable, and it’s graced by an exceptional duality of the dark mood of the verse and a ray of light in the chorus. Lively use of percussion and drums and clever use of sampling step into the foreground in the bonus track I Believe. It would also have been a sin if the fourth bonus track, LuvinU, hadn’t made it onto the new album’s material. However much the effects on Geoff’s vocal might grate on your ears, a masterfully dynamic and rock-solid rhythm section once again lifts this track to a high level of melodic quality. The minimized guitar phrase is left just enough room to make itself heard in a solo of salty arabesques, which is more than enough. Metalheads! Here’s something for you, because a metal riff finally steps into the foreground in the rolling I Take You. A riff that owes a little to Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir, while The Lie embodies it in the guitar phrase of its verse. This is again a track where Rockenfield’s exceptional drumming takes the expressive lead.
The variety between the tracks, like the variety within the tracks, is also the fruit of taking on board the ideas of musicians and producers who in one way or another contributed their ideas during the recording of the album, and which the core members of Queensryche took into account.
To “wrap up”: an exceptional album! Flawless. With it, Queensryche have actually managed to crown the era of the new age injected by the release of the album “Hear In The Now Frontier” (1997)! “Dedicated To Chaos” is an album of fiercely dark, almost apocalyptic atmosphere, fitting for its title. On this album the band’s art rock character has reached a level of maturity that stands up to every meaning of the word progressive (in the basic sense of the word). With this release Queensryche showed that they keep evolving without a care and expanding their reach into fields of undiscovered and not yet attained musical dimensions. Experiment is a tool Queensryche wield skillfully, and they handle its energy like the back of their hand. It builds on the excellence of its predecessor “American Soldier”, since it has even more fresh provocation, which in every second easily carries the established axioms of the foundations of Queensryche eclecticism. The most experimental album of Queensryche’s career, on which the band flawlessly managed to merge several seemingly unbridgeable musical genres with the elements of Queensryche artistry.
With all that excellence, though, one thing is certain. The album will go mostly overlooked. Unfairly. Because it doesn’t lag behind the brilliant eighties era in any way, only in how it presents its ideas, which keep all their credibility if we compare the two eras. What’s more, they build on it. Constant change, then, hasn’t stopped for Queensryche. We can only say that a certain circle has closed, one in which Queensryche finished saying everything they had been trying, more or less effectively, to find and give to the world on albums between 1997 and 2009. “Dedicated To Chaos” is a point that really knows no flaw, and with it the band managed to reach into fields of new dimensions, take their unique idiom to a new level, and secure for the future all the artistic freedom through which we can predict a thrilling new successor to “Dedicated To Chaos”. Where Queensryche will go next is a fact that should stir people’s minds quite a bit for a while. The album carries a fiercely dark atmosphere, thanks above all to the use of vocals and vocal harmonies. It’s precisely the integration of the vocals that adds a feeling of the alternative, while the progressive face of Queensryche remains unblemished.
Lineup
Geoff Tate – vocals, saxophone
Michael Wilton – guitar
Eddie Jackson – bass
Scott Rockenfield – drums, percussion, keyboards
Kelly Gray – guitar
Parker Lundgren – guitar
Randy Gane – keyboards
Miranda Tate – backing vocals
Jeson Ames – backing vocals
Production
Kelly Gray
Track list
1. Get Started (3:33)
2. Hot Spot Junkie (3:57)
3. Got It Bad (3:45)
4. Around the World (5:10)
5. Higher (4:00)
6. Retail Therapy (4:13)
7. At the Edge (6:03)
8. Broken (bonus track)(3:51)
9. Hard Times (bonus track) (5:32)
10. Drive (4:53)
11. I Believe (bonus track) (3:29)
12. LuvnU (bonus track) (3:53)
13. Wot We Do (3:45)
14. I Take You (3:50)
15. The Lie (4:18)
16. Big Noize (6:35)
