Artist: Queensrÿche
Label: EMI Records
Released: 1986
“Rage for Order”, the follow-up to “The Warning” (1984), thoroughly broke with the classic approach Queensryche had grown up on. The second half of the eighties had kicked off, hair glam metal rock was on the march,… Funnily enough, the band was invited on a headliner tour by none other than the overconfident, makeup-caked hair rockers Ratt. In the US, Queensryche were opening for AC/DC at the time and kept steadily showing up in front of a wider audience. But let’s take it from the top.
In the second half of the eighties, metalheads developed a serious taste for keyboards, and playing keys through guitar “synthesizers” was getting especially popular. Since new-wave metal bands had never paid much attention to keyboards, they basically had two options. Hire a keyboardist who’s up to the job, the way Ozzy Osbourne could afford to, or try their hand at the keys themselves. As for the latter, experiments like that from 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 deliver a career album (“Somewhere In Time”, 1986), an album with an above-average IQ, even by Iron Maiden standards. Queensryche couldn’t resist the temptation either. For starters, they put on a glam look: teased-up hair, crimson-decked leather, boots, makeup and powder as a given, but closer to the Duran Duran “Wild Boys era” than to W.A.S.P. And that’s not all.
In the new production, the keyboards are often almost on equal footing with the guitars. “Rage For Order” is a polished album on the production front. It has a clear, clean sound! The instruments are distinctly separated from each other, the guitar tone is thinner and more precise, yet sharply taut and honed enough to keep the whole thing firmly in a tough grip. On the flip side of that same story, there’s a lot of emptied-out space, which is filled by the cannon-like approach to the drum production, which takes up a huge amount of room in the new sound. The sound of the drums themselves suddenly ballooned, and the pounding at times even recalls a mob of raging hooligans smashing things up after a lost football match (Walk In The Shadows). In contrast, this thunder fills out the depth of the sound, and the sound gains liveliness and, of course, dynamics. What’s more, the drum production sounds downright cheekily metallic at moments, not to mention that fans of “industrial” (?) might even find a bone to chew on in this sound.
On “Rage For Order” the choruses are the center of attention, all of them subordinated to melodies in which Queensryche once again prove they’re born writers and composers of short, compact tracks that stick in your memory immediately. Had they kept on sophisticating the sound, they could have dangerously approached bands like Styx, Kansas or Journey. Okay, those are just hints, “what ifs”!
To the strict, elemental metal figure, Queensryche have now added a rich dose of experimentation with the new album. Roughly speaking, the result is an art rock album. But Queensryche kept their distinctive stature and voice, and stretched them out considerably 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 much greater extent as far as melody goes, 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 more of Tate’s melodies now, but the sense of dark atmosphere that marks the “bare” metal guitars of “The Warning” and the EP “Queensryche” has largely been lost!
You’d never praise a more precise, ironed-out new production like this 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 bit. The Wilton/DeGarmo duo is no longer so teenage-rowdy and eager to prove themselves. Both of their soloing is more controlled. Evidently they matured very quickly in this respect and started putting the melody of more carefully chosen notes into the music. Queensryche have always been regarded as a band with a “big intellect”. The sophistication of the sound in an art direction opened the green light for adding acoustics, keyboards and witty programmed sampling (Neue Regel stands out far above the rest of the album here). The share of mid-tempo to slower songs is especially higher than usual, which, on the other hand, emphasizes even more the sense of melancholy and drama brought by Tate’s way of 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 strength in writing strikingly emotional ballads!
The direct Walk In The Shadows effectively shakes off a chorus that creeps venomously under your skin. It’s a heavy-hitting track that stands out qualitatively when you look across the band’s whole career. The AOR-style “multi-harmonies” in the chorus brilliantly magnify the touch of melancholy!
The album’s color palette gets spiced up by the rock rhythm in The Whisper, as if it were stolen from Rod Stewart’s Baby Jane, an evergreen pop rock hit! Of course Queensryche are suitably wound up. Gonna Get Close To You, originally by Lisa Dalbello, which in Queensryche’s hands bursts with all kinds of moods, brings in its case a gorgeous example of art rock. A creation beyond comparison. A slightly villainous, creeping, spooky atmosphere, Tate in an almost deliberately “off-key” David Bowie mode, programmed drum patterns, a real carousel of different rhythms and sub-rhythms. Queensryche touch this field of “incomparability” masterfully quite a few times.
The Killing Words, by now a standard power ballad that you can apparently start predicting in advance on every Queenryche album, and Screaming In Digital are the moments on the record that structurally share the most with “The Warning”.
Surgical Strike and Neue Regel, on the other hand, clearly point to something that’s only going to happen two years later. The pieces that make up the mosaic picture 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. Still, the fact that the band kept the toothy formula of a beast’s jaws that remains dangerously sharpened is proven by Chemical Youth (We Are Rebellion), with its metal getaway, though the experimental outro section calms it down completely, where the rhythms again jerkily break apart beneath the dramatic wailing of guitars hanging on the tremolo.
“Rage For Order” is a special album, one that grows slowly, but once you take it as your own, it rewards you richly. And it’s an album that only Queensryche could produce. So, by integrating all those experiments, Queensryche evolved to a higher level of quality, and with “Rage for Order” specifically, 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. Queensryche could have easily made an album like “The Warning” back then and anchored themselves even deeper in the heavy metal that was popular at the time, 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 an extremely important album. It’s the predecessor of “Operation: Mindcrime”. Stylistically it’s already closer to its successor, and on it Queensryche seriously used, for the first time, the extensors and flexors of their progressive musculature, which gave birth to a superb art (metal) rock album, with which the guys passed their maturity test with a perfect ten!
Lineup
Geoff Tate – vocals
Chris DeGarmo – guitar
Michael Wilton – guitar
Eddie Jackson – bass guitar
Scott Rockenfield – drums
GUEST MUSICIAN
Neil Kernon – keyboards
Production
Neil Kernon
Tracklist
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
Album length: 45.59
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)
Total reissue length: 63.35
