Label: Century Media Records
Release date: October 7, 2022
Production: Chris “Zeuss” Harris
Album length: 60:28 min
Genre: Heavy Metal / Progressive Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
Believe it or not, Queensryche are back with a new album. “Digital Noise Alliance” is the band’s fourth studio album since that stormy period that only calmed down once vocalist Todd La Torre came on board. The previous record, “The Verdict” (2019), was a step away from the first two La Torre-era Queensrÿche albums, which brought back to the band’s musical artistry a lot of what put them forever among the most visible and important names on the world heavy metal map. “The Verdict,” which you can’t possibly call a bad album, left some gaps open. You get the feeling that a lovely bunch of songs carried untapped potential, that they could have grown into something even bigger artistically. So overall, the album comes off as definitely more meager than you’d expect by the usual Queensryche standards.
“Digital Noise Alliance” fully fixes the feeling that Queensryche got too comfortable with “The Verdict,” or worse. That they meant to keep going down a “less interesting musical path,” fronted by a deliberately “imprecise” production sound. The new album delivers outstanding tightness, backed by a hugely skilled and effectively hungry polish on the songs themselves, packed with catchy, bombastic melodies. These come either in the trademark triple-guitar harmonies that instantly sound like Queensrycheian classics (they shoot you straight back to the eighties), or in the combo of the ultra-musical La Torre, aiming for extreme vocal heights, with vivid backing vocals that feel just as nostalgic. On top of all that, it has to be said that this time Queensryche managed to weave together some seriously penetrating guitar phrases, which lay the foundation for the cunningly bold and successfully executed arrangements of the new material.
There are moments that sound especially interesting. One of the darker tracks on the album is the doom-laden Behind The Walls, which once again wins over the band’s fans instantly with a phenomenal chorus melody, the kind only the old Queensryche school of music can crank out. In this song the band also brings out, more clearly than anywhere else on the album, some of those elements that have always tied the essence of classic Queensryche to flirting with progressive metal. That character gets a deeper dive on the closing and seriously dark Tormentum, which, with its extended and dynamic instrumental section, delivers the album’s artistic peak. Nocturnal Light, smack in the middle of the album, doesn’t shy away from these artistic challenges either.
The production is again “brighter” and “clearer” compared to the “crunchy,” almost “demo-like” feel of the simpler-sounding predecessor “The Verdict,” which will once again be grist to the mill for all of you who can’t forget the golden era between 1982 and 1994.
It’s not just the opening In Extremis: it’s followed back to back by three more intense heavy metal marches that build an incredibly effective alliance of riff voltage and hungry musical rhetoric. It doesn’t get much more convincing than this. The “mid-eight” passages again skillfully deepen the drama and theater through shifts in dynamics, and that’s where the new band member’s contribution really sparks. That’s Kamelot drummer Casey Grillo, whom Queensryche have been thoroughly road-testing on concert stages in recent years. With his varied playing, he once again lifted the level of the new material to where you’d expect from Queensryche anyway. Even now that Scott Rockenfield is no longer in the lineup. Grillo has fit into the band perfectly.
What Queensryche do this time, with particularly skillful and refined artistic elegance, is mix the old with the new. There’s a constant feeling that the eighties are with us, since the songs keep drawing parallels with the character of the material made mainly between 1982 and 1988. At the same time, the five-piece deserve extra praise for their inspiration this time, because the new ideas feel dynamic and incredibly fresh at once. As a result, they’re positively brimming with intensely dedicated polishing.
Some followers of the old Queensryche will never be completely satisfied. They’ll always bring up that the magic with Geoff Tate is unique and unrepeatable. True. But that’s worth treating as part of the band’s past. What Queensryche offer on their fourth album without Geoff in the lineup is actually more than a phenomenal approximation of that magic, which is never coming back. Why? Because a new magic has been born in the meantime. With Todd, that is. And it works damn well. If any doubts crept in after the weaker “The Verdict,” you can now even argue that “Digital Noise Alliance” is a step up from both “Condition Human” (2015) and “Queensrÿche” (2013).
With the feeling that the desire to make a truly top-notch album was bigger than “the whole world” this time, that the current lineup (including the addition of guitarist Mike Stone, who has worked with Queensrÿche in the past) has caught the right creative chemistry and understands each other perfectly, and last but not least with a sense of extraordinary ease, an ever-present glow of heart and a display of bulletproof confidence, “Digital Noise Alliance” definitely takes the artistic throne over the three previous Queensrÿche albums. That’s what the newest material reflects, led by the calmer and acoustically uplifted Forest, which is by no means Silent Lucidity, yet burns 100% Queensrycheian. From start to finish. In one piece. Really? The band tacked a cover of the evergreen hit Rebell Yell, originally by Billy Idol, onto the tail end of the album. And here we go again. Good thing that track is at the end. It doesn’t fit alongside the rest. Not because the cover is, after all, done Queensrÿche-style, but because of the pronounced stylistic departure, which not even the heavy metal wrapping a la Queensrÿche can blur. But that’s always been the case with Queensrÿche. Even in the classic days, when they recorded covers of other artists, so there’s no point making too much drama out of the band’s decision to include this cover on “Digital Noise Alliance.”
So what we have here is a Queensryche album that all the nostalgics for the band’s good old days will agree captures the essence of those times most impressively and effectively, and translates it into new ones. Queensrÿche have surely delivered, after the shipwreck of 2012, the achievement we were all waiting for. Especially all the fans with their feet on the ground, who never turned their backs on the band and who, precisely because of that, know how and are able to treat the band’s artistry in the Geoff Tate era (as a separate piece of Queensryche history) as equal to the other eras of the quintet’s “winding” evolutionary path.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. In Extremis
2. Chapters
3. Lost in Sorrow
4. Sicdeth
5. Behind the Walls
6. Nocturnal Light
7. Out of the Black
8. Forest
9. Realms
10. Hold On
11. Tormentum
12. Rebel Yell (bonus track)
Lineup:
Todd La Torre – vocals, backing vocals
Michael Wilton – guitar
Mike Stone – guitar
Eddie Jackson – bass
Casey Grillo – drums
