Label: EMI Records
Production: James Guthrie
Release date: 07.09.1984
Album length: 48.36 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Attention! Warning! Alarm! It’s coming from another galaxy, from another world, a new race is on the march, a new dominant species, a new beginning, a new world, welcome to Armageddon! With a cover made especially for all the genuine and wannabe “hit-makers” of this long-since completely deranged planet, Queensrÿche arrived at their first real studio album, “The Warning”, and actually started building a new world!
For the most part, “The Warning” keeps to the guidelines of the EP “Queensrÿche”, released a year earlier. That EP did very well for the band in terms of popularity, so the guys didn’t even have to put one of its big four songs on their first studio album, since demand for it stayed healthy. “The Warning” is a fresh demonstration of a top-quality, classic approach to heavy metal. It’s a direct upgrade of the pioneering work of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and as such it signals that there are still unexplored musical horizons within reach, where heavy metal can grow and reshape itself into new forms and missions.
While preaching, the guys remain wrapped in mysticism and the exuberant richness of the occult as imagined by the human mind. On the album you’ll find a few tracks that are more closely tied to what the EP “Queensrÿche” offered. There’s the punchy, anthemic ballad No Sanctuary, which in structure may even be the closest to The Lady Wore Black from the EP “Queensrÿche”, with orchestral arrangements that add excitement to the song and ramp up its sense of drama. Then there’s the explosive title track, which sets the album on fire the moment it kicks off, and the seriously obscure En Force. N M 156 is without doubt one of the album’s peaks, thanks to the band’s perfection and innate knack for combining melody and aggression in a single expression. Compared to their peers in the US heavy metal wave of the early eighties, Queensrÿche were always the closest to European and Japanese ears: of all the bands of their generation they offered the most melody and the clearest production, and of course they had the vocal wizard Geoff Tate in their ranks. The pomp and hymn-like quality captured by Take Hold Of The Flame is a perfect example of how to marry a venomous, witty riff to a big melody that rules the song completely, and that’s why it became a huge hit in Japan.
Even a first glance at the material on the EP “Queensrÿche” showed that Geoff Tate is no “normal” singer! He’s no everyday singer. So “The Warning” confirms that we’re dealing with one of the finest, most recognizable and most impressive voices heavy metal has ever had in any of its many forms. The articulation of his timbre and the way he brings moods to life, with a lived-in and heartfelt approach, still hard to top today, weaving between subtlety and the high tension of his fully unleashed upper register, simply takes your breath away. With his “operatic” approach on Queensryche albums of the eighties, Tate earned his status as one of the greatest and most respected heavy metal singers of all time, not to say rock singers in general. The band’s later musical experiments showed that his voice could also work superbly in genres like AOR or pop rock. Direct proof of what Tate’s voice can conjure up is the 9-minute mini epic poem Roads To Madness. It’s the closing track, and it stands out in quality on the album.
The soul of the album is the contribution of five members in coordinated creative collaboration, with ideal working chemistry. The bold novelty that gives the album an extra jolt is the addition of orchestral arrangements that fill the background, heighten the sense of intensity and drama, and lift the mood of the album, bringing a truly theatrical effect to “The Warning”.
In their songwriting, especially in shaping most of the transitions between the basic motifs of choruses and pre-choruses, within distinctively built instrumental middle sections that don’t hurt the album’s flow at all but instead boost its dynamics and heavy atmosphere (how cunning!), and through certain motif sequences that tie into one another, Queensrÿche signaled that they could develop more broadly, beyond the fields marked out in classic heavy metal. The choice of passages and the high melodic development of the individual songs is thus infused with the band’s own specifics, and on “The Warning” Queensrÿche carried over all their recognizability and uniqueness in full, which shone even more clearly compared to the seeds planted on the EP “Queensrÿche”. Some perfectly innocent elements, which later progressive metal inventions “blame” them for, glimmer in passing in the album’s creations, such as Before The Storm (especially the middle instrumental section), Child Of Fire and the already mentioned Roads To Madness, which offers the most cues of all for the band’s further evolution. It’s worth noting that the early addition of these elements loosely ties in with the simultaneous development of Fates Warning and their debut “Nights On Brocken”, though the latter quickly escaped into the waters of complex fragmentation at the expense of melody, while melody is something Queensrÿche never gave up, and the apostolate of “follow the melody” is one of the core tenets they faithfully served in the eighties. That’s why they’re one of the most “European” bands outside of Europe. Both bands, Fates Warning and Queensrÿche, were hugely influential on the development of what critics later dubbed “progressive metal”, which, especially in Queensryche’s case, is a wildly inappropriate genre label, since all their studio albums are quite far from one another in sonic and stylistic layering.
“The Warning” marks the end of Queensrÿche’s evolution in classic heavy metal. The very next album, “Rage For Order”, took the band’s expression up a big, intelligent notch, offering plenty of new musical looks and challenges, while Queensrÿche never muddied their unique identity or their recognizable perfection in delivering melody in their own distinctive voice!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 9.0 / 10
Track list:
1. Warning
2. En Force
3. Deliverance
4. No Sanctuary
5. N M 156
6. Take Hold Of The Flame
7. Before The Storm
8. Child Of Fire
9. Roads To Madness
BONUS TRACKS ON THE REISSUE (2003):
10. Prophecy
11. The Lady Wore Black (live)
12. Take Hold Of The Flame (live)
Lineup:
Geoff Tate – vocals
Chris DeGarmo – guitar
Michael Wilton – guitar
Eddie Jackson – bass guitar
Scott Rockenfield – drums
Guest:
Michael Kamen – orchestral arrangements
