Label: EMI Records
Release date: 27.06.1986
Production: Neil Kernon
Album length: 45.59 min
Genre: Heavy Metal / Art Metal
“Rage for Order”, the follow-up to “The Warning” (1984), made a clean break with the classic approach Queensryche had grown up on. The second half of the eighties was underway, hair glam metal rock was on the march,… It’s interesting, too, that the band got invited onto a headline tour by the overconfident, makeup-caked hair rockers Ratt. In the US, Queensryche were opening shows for AC/DC at the time and kept putting themselves in front of a wider audience. Anyway, let’s take it from the top.
In the second half of the eighties, metalheads developed a serious appetite for keyboards, and playing keys through guitar “synthesizers” was getting especially popular. Given that new-wave metal bands had never paid keyboards all that much attention, they had only two options. Hire a keyboardist who’s up to the job, as Ozzy Osbourne could afford to do, or have a go at playing keyboards themselves. As for the latter, such experiments by Judas Priest (“Turbo”, 1986) and Saxon (“Destiny”, 1986) went down in flames, while Iron Maiden, on the other hand, managed to beat that challenge and cough up the album of their career (“Somewhere In Time”, 1986), an album with an above-average IQ for Iron Maiden. Queensryche couldn’t resist these temptations either. To start with, they put on a glam look: teased-up hair, flashy crimson leather, boots, makeup and powder as a given, but closer to the Duran Duran “Wild Boys era” than to W.A.S.P. And there’s more.
In the new production, the keyboards are often almost on equal footing with the guitars. “Rage For Order” is a polished album production-wise. It has a clear, clean sound! The instruments are clearly separated from one another, the guitar tone is thinner and more precise, yet sharply tightened and honed enough to keep the whole thing firmly in a tough grip. Then again, on the flip side of the same story there’s a lot of empty space, which is filled by the cannon-like production of the drums, which take up a huge amount of room in the new sound. The sound of the drums themselves suddenly grew; the pounding even sometimes recalls a mob of enraged hooligans smashing things up after a lost football match (Walk In The Shadows). Against this thunder, they fill out the depth of the sound, and the sound gains liveliness and, of course, dynamics. What’s more, this drum production comes across at times downright cheekily metallic, not to mention that fans of “industrial” (?) might even find a bone to gnaw on in this sound.
On “Rage For Order” the choruses are the center of attention, all of them subordinated to melodies in which Queensryche prove once again that they’re born writers and composers of short, compact songs that stick in your memory right away. Had they kept sophisticating the sound further, they could have dangerously approached bands like Styx, Kansas or Journey. Okay, those are just hints, “what ifs”!
To the strict, elementary metal figure, Queensryche have now added a rich dose of experimentation with the new album. The result is, roughly speaking, an art rock album. But Queensryche kept their distinctive stature and voice, and stretched it out properly in the process! Let’s not forget: this bold evolutionary leap laid the foundations for the creation of the unsurpassed “Operation: Mindcrime” (1988) . On “Rage For Order” the extraordinary potential of Tate’s vocals is exploited to a far greater degree when it comes to melody, precisely thanks to the greater control over the guitar sound, which is thinned out and brought closer to the tuning of the keyboard sound. There’s even more Tate melody now, but much of the dark atmosphere that marked the “bare” metal guitars of “The Warning” and the EP “Queensryche” got lost!
You wouldn’t praise a more precise, slicker new production so much if the material weren’t once again something that can boast nothing but superlatives. Let me say that, besides the changes in how the sound is handled, the guys also “simplified” the work a little. The Wilton/DeGarmo duo is no longer so teenage-rowdy and eager to prove themselves. Their soloing is more controlled. Obviously they matured very quickly in that respect and started placing the melody of carefully chosen notes into the music. Queensryche have always been considered a band of “great intellect”. The sophistication of the sound in the art direction gave the green light to adding acoustics, keyboards and witty programmed sampling (Neue Regel stands out far beyond everything else on the album in that department). In particular, the share of mid-tempo to slower songs is bigger than usual, which in turn further underlines the feeling of melancholy and drama brought by Tate’s singing in a dominant register. The drama is top-notch in the songs London, I Dream In Infrared, This Killing Words and generally in the intense closer I Will Remember, which proves the band’s power in writing piercingly sensual ballads!
The direct Walk In The Shadows efficiently shakes off a chorus that creeps venomously under your skin. It’s a song of heavy-hitting caliber that stands out qualitatively when you look across the band’s career. The AOR-ish “multi-harmonies” in the chorus brilliantly magnify the hint of melancholy!
The record’s variety is spiced up by the rock rhythm in The Whisper, as if stolen from Rod Stewart’s Baby Jane, an evergreen pop rock hit! Of course Queensryche wind it up appropriately. Gonna Get Close To You, originally by Lisa Dalbello, which in Queensryche’s hands is bursting with all kinds of moods, delivers a gorgeous example of art rock in this case. A creation beyond comparison. A slightly villainous, creeping, eerie atmosphere, Tate in a deliberately “off-key” David Bowie feel, programmed drum patterns, a real merry-go-round of different rhythms and sub-rhythms. Queensryche touch on this field of “incomparability” masterfully quite a few times.
The song The Killing Words, by now a standard heavy-hitting ballad that we can apparently start predicting in advance on every Queenryche album, and Screaming In Digital are the moments on the record whose structure has the most in common with “The Warning”.
Surgical Strike and Neue Regel, on the other hand, clearly point to something that will only happen two years down the road. The pieces that make up the mosaic of both songs as a whole, through the rhythm switches, passages, guitar embellishments and the inclusion of samples, most directly hint at which step the band would decisively take in its further development. As for proof that the band kept the dental formula of the beast’s jaws, still dangerously sharpened, Chemical Youth (We Are Rebellion) does the job with its metal escape, though the closing instrumental section calms it down completely in an experimental way, with the rhythms again breaking jerkily beneath the dramatic howling of guitars hanging off the tremolo.
“Rage For Order” is a special album, an album that grows slowly, but once you take it as your own, it rewards you richly. And it’s the kind of album only Queensryche can come up with. So with all the experiments integrated, Queensryche evolved to a higher quality level and, with “Rage for Order”, a clear break from classic heavy metal clichés, managed for the first time in their career to express all their standard trademarks in a clearly recognizable way. “Rage For Order” is an album that cooked up something completely new in a musical sense, and one that rewards the listener for a very long time. Back then Queensryche could easily have made a “The Warning”-type album and anchored themselves even deeper in the then-popular heavy metal, but let’s not forget: this is a band with brains, for whom trying out and discovering new things is essential to their very development and existence. “Rage For Order” is one seriously important album. It’s the predecessor to “Operation: Mindcrime”. Stylistically it’s already closer to its successor, and on it Queensryche seriously flexed the extensors and flexors of their progressive musculature for the first time, producing a superb art (metal) rock album that the guys passed their maturity exam with, with a straight perfect ten!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 9.5 / 10
Track list:
1. Walk In The Shadows
2. I Dream In Infrared
3. Whisper
4. Gonna Get Close To You
5. Killing Words
6. Surgical Strike
7. Neue Regal
8. Chemical Youth (We Are Rebellion)
9. London
10. Screaming In Digital
11. I Will Remember
REISSUE BONUS TRACKS (2003):
12. Gonna Get Close To You
13. Killing Words (live)
14. I Dream In Infrared
15. Walk In The Shadows (live)
Lineup:
Geoff Tate – vocals
Chris DeGarmo – guitar
Michael Wilton – guitar
Eddie Jackson – bass guitar
Scott Rockenfield – drums
GUEST MUSICIAN
Neil Kernon – keyboards
