Label: Roadrunner Records
Release date: 21.06.2011
Production: Kelly Gray
Album length: 70.51
Genre: Art Metal
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 ruled 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 make the point: 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 working fresh experimentation into their sound. Guts is something this band has never lacked. The trouble only started when everybody began demanding a rehash of “Operation Mindcrime” and “Empire”. The band’s blessing or curse, depending on how you look at it, lies above all in the fact (maybe a one-of-a-kind historical phenomenon in rock) that Queensryche came out of the seeds of American speed metal (an early twin brother in that respect was, say, Fates Warning) and kept the guitar phrasing “in the metal sense” clearly built in all the way through “Promised Land”, even though ages ago they stopped playing “pure” metal (from 1986 on, no more). Which means that in the eighties they won the majority backing of a loyal metal crowd. But once you betray that loyalty, you really fall from grace. All the metal fans who put “Operation Mindcrime” at the top of the menu of Queensryche’s discography, with its clear step away from metal toward art rock (which is controversial enough on that point alone), still aren’t willing to sacrifice even a smidgen of brain-wrinkle flexibility to grasp that Queensryche’s expressive reach outgrew the confines of metal long ago. Queensryche are a band that can reach into any genre you like, and then some. Into a fusion of all the different genre forms of the musical universe. In fact, they don’t know limits and don’t want to. Yes. You might already be guessing, and it’s true. What we have here is an experimental, wildly varied album, by far the most successfully put together one of the post-“Hear In The Now Frontier” era. Provocation is, in other words, Queensryche’s middle name.
This is an album that needs time to settle in. That means plenty of spins in the player. And of course you listen to it on headphones, because it comes with top-notch production, a blend of countless sonic collages whose veils you’ll keep lifting for a long time while you enjoy what’s on this record. Anyone not ready to give the album a bit of their time should rather not bother with it. It’s extremely deep and, as such, demanding. But once it touches even the most remote corners of the listener’s soul with that depth, sticking with it gets richly rewarded.
If you skim the track list of the “Dedicated To Chaos” edition with the added bonus tracks, you’ll see the running time pretty much fills the whole CD. And this time it’s flat-out incredible that there isn’t a single track on the album you could call “filler”, a minute-stealer, or more nicely put, a “headache”. Every touch of arrangement on this album has a point, because you can instantly pick out the constant presence of Queensryche’s unique musical character and eclecticism, breathed into even the boldest, most provocative tinkering with experimentation, so that 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 have almost backfired. I’m talking about Wot We Do, a track that a few tiny tweaks by any musician could send straight into dub/hip-hop territory, and yet the band, with touches of experiment, masterfully turned the whole situation to its advantage and fought out a new 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 slot them into the middle of the running order. The guys simply knew their quality, which doesn’t lag behind the regular tracks of the new album in any way. In them too the band surprises with a remarkable freshness in using new musical ideas, so these tracks don’t even need the “bonus” label.
It might also sound provocative that on the new album Queensryche carried the charisma of past albums, even those from their golden era that define the sound and style of their two most successful records, into a vividly expressive mosaic of songs the likes of which we’ve never heard from the band. Yes. The springboard is the excellent predecessor “American Soldier”, but with this fundamental difference: this time Queensryche shook off all the shackles, even in terms of conceptualizing the message, which let the band spread its wings fully 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 once did. All the Queensryche elements. Including the flawless delivery of Geoff Tate’s verses, which, in his established standard of theatrical interpretation soaked in subtlety, keeps the primacy as the first face of Queensryche artistry. The new album no longer has that deliberately “smeared” feel of the band’s Seattle roots, the collages are tied together with more sonic control, yet they keep all the dynamics and spectral depth.
Queensryche have always been famous for the grip of their compact rhythmic structures. On every production, at every stage of their artistic maturing. And on the new album that element is noticeably emphasized. An integral part of the songs’ arrangement structure, offering major support to Geoff’s multifaceted vocals as he strings together moods, falls this time largely on the rhythm tandem of Eddie Jackson and Scott Rockenfield. The dreamy, moody closer Big Noize is the clearest 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 payoff in the use of vocal articulation. Woven into this fabric are guitars as extra melodic filler, which successfully pins 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 understanding of music, yet at the same time of the band’s clearly defined, unique art rock stance, with a progressive essence that stands out on the new release.
This intensified rhythm section work surfaces throughout the album’s running time in different doses, and you can feel its full pulse, which stands out in the production at every moment. Get Started, with its volumetrically fattened-up bass legs, is the album’s straight-ahead rock moment, instantly sketching the picture of new-era Queensryche art rock. Hot Spot Junki flows after two and a half minutes into an instrumental guitar section that’s not hard to link to the tricks of “Operation Mindcrime”. Michael Wilton at work, basically. Got It Bad is downright cheekily danceable, with rhythm of typical funk design. Very successful tinkering with a pop element, in other words. If you survived 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 tight rhythmic grip and polished melodiousness, something Queensryche carry in their little finger, it’s just that over the course of their career that strength has shown up in different musical forms. A great track with strictly positive vibes. Next comes the album’s first moment of 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 flows through demanding rhythmic textures, with a completely unpredictable course of events and a middle instrumental section that touches on elements of jazz. The track runs 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 tune with the outro trick of chaotically overlapping shouts used long ago in Eyes Of A Stranger, with the closing detonation: “Revolutiuon”! Here again is the harder, grittier Retail Therapy, which eases the demands of the previous track, and right after it comes the album’s new peak in the immensely dark At The Edge, which brings an exceptional combination of homegrown rhythmic underpinnings carrying an excellent curtain of sampling, a palette of freely floating guitar chords and a fascinating integration of a sax solo that relieves the cataclysmic state. Broken, whose title comes with the “bonus” tag, reuses a stunt Geoff pulled once before, the “Hush, hush” delivery, even though this ballad of dark veils is a light-year 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 mood compared to the gloomy Broken. Drive isn’t a cover of the hit by The Cars, but it again raises the adrenaline level of rock-and-roll 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 outstanding duality of dark verse mood and a ray of light in the chorus. Lively use of percussion and drums and clever 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 into the new album’s batch of material. However much the effects Geoff’s vocal is run through might grate on your ear, the track is again lifted to a high-quality level by its melodiousness, a masterfully dynamic and rock-solid rhythm section. The guitar phrasing is minimized, with just enough room left to announce itself in a solo of salty arabesques, which is more than enough. Metalheads! Here’s something for you, because the 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 outstanding drum work takes the expressive lead.
The variety between the tracks, like the variety within them, is also the fruit of taking on board the ideas of the musicians and producers who, one way or another, contributed their ideas during the recording of the album, and which the core members of Queensryche listened to.
To “wrap up”. An outstanding album! Flawless. With it, Queensryche have actually managed to crown the new-era period that was injected by the release of ”Hear In The Now Frontier” (1997)! “Dedicated To Chaos” is an album of immensely dark, almost apocalyptic atmosphere, true to its title. The band’s art rock character reached a level of maturity on this album that holds up to every meaning of the word progressive (in the basic sense of the word). With this release Queensryche showed they keep evolving unburdened and widening their reach into fields of undiscovered and not-yet-reached musical dimensions. Experiment is a tool that Queensryche wield skillfully, and they command 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 across the established axioms of the basics of Queensryche eclecticism. The most experimental album of Queensryche’s career, on which the band flawlessly managed to fuse several seemingly unbridgeable musical genres with the elements of Queensryche artistry.
For all its 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 the ideas are delivered, and those keep all their credibility if we compare the two eras. What’s more. They build on it. So constant change 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 seek out and give the world on the 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, carry its unique vocabulary to a new level and secure for the future all the artistic freedom through which we can predict an exciting successor to “Dedicated To Chaos”. Where Queensryche will go then is a fact that should stir up some heated debate for a while. The album carries an immensely dark atmosphere, thanks above all to the use of vocals and vocal harmonies. It’s precisely the integration of vocals that adds a feeling of the alternative, next to which Queensryche’s progressive face stays unsullied.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 8.5 / 10
Tracks:
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)
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
