Artist: Queensrÿche
Label: EMI Records
Released: 1984
Heads up! 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 to the liking of all the sincere and self-styled “hitmakers” of this long-since utterly deranged planet, Queensrÿche arrived at their first proper studio album, “The Warning”, and actually set about creating a new world!
For the most part, “The Warning” keeps to the course set by the EP released a year earlier, “Queensrÿche“. The “Queensrÿche” EP did very well out of it in terms of getting the band known, so the guys didn’t have to put a single one of that EP’s big four tracks on the first studio album, since demand for it kept holding up nicely. “The Warning” is a fresh showcase of a high-quality, classic approach to heavy metal. It’s a direct step up from 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 undiscovered musical horizons within reach, where heavy metal can grow and morph into new shapes and missions.
While delivering their sermon, the guys stay wrapped in mystique and the exuberant richness of occultism drawn from the lush imagination of humankind. The album has a few tracks that are more closely tied to what the “Queensrÿche” EP offers us. There’s the punchy, anthemic ballad No Sanctuary, which in structure may even be the closest to The Lady Wore Black from the “Queensrÿche” EP, with orchestral arrangements that add excitement and amp up the sense of drama; then there’s the explosive title track, which in an instant properly sets the album on fire at the start, and the seriously obscure En Force. N M 156 is without doubt one of the album’s peaks, for its perfection and the band’s innate knack for combining melody and aggression in one expression. Compared to their peers in the US heavy metal wave of the early eighties, Queensrÿche were the closest to European and Japanese ears, since of all the bands of their generation they always 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 grandeur captured in Take Hold Of The Flame, for instance, is a direct example of the perfect fusion of a venomous, witty riff entirely subordinated to the big melody that adorns the song, which is how it became a huge hit in Japan.
Even a glimpse at the material on the “Queensrÿche” EP made it clear that Geoff Tate is no “normal” singer! 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 incarnations. The articulation of his tone and the way he brings moods to life, through a vivid and sensual approach, that weaving between subtlety and the high tension of his full-blooded turmoil in the highest registers, still hard to top today, simply takes your breath away. With his “operatic” approach on Queensryche’s eighties albums, Tate earned the status of one of the greatest and most esteemed heavy metal singers of all time, not to say rock singers in general. The band’s later musical experiments then showed that his voice can be an excellent fit for genres like AOR or pop rock too. Direct proof of what Tate’s voice can conjure up is the nine-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 harmonious creative collaboration with ideal working chemistry, while the album’s bold novelty, which gives it an extra jolt, is the addition of orchestral arrangements that fill the background, crank up the sense of intensity and drama and lift the mood of the album, bringing a properly theatrical effect to “The Warning”.
In their songwriting, especially in shaping most of the transitions between the basic motifs of the choruses and pre-choruses, within distinctively built instrumental middle sections that in no way hurt the album’s flow but instead boost its dynamics and lofty atmosphere (how crafty!), and through certain motif sequences that tie into one another, Queensrÿche signaled that they could grow wider, beyond the fields marked out by classic heavy metal. The choice of passages and the high melodic development of the album’s individual songs are steeped in the specifics of Queensrÿche, and on “The Warning” they carried over their full recognizability and uniqueness, which shone through even more clearly compared to the seeds on the “Queensrÿche” EP. Some perfectly innocent elements that they get “blamed” for in the later inventions of progressive metal flicker fleetingly through the album’s creations, such as Before The Storm (especially its 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 too that the early addition of these elements ran loosely parallel to the simultaneous development of Fates Warning and their debut “Nights On Brocken”, except that the latter very quickly fled into the waters of complex fragmentation at the expense of breaking up the melody, and melody is something Queensrÿche never gave up on, and the gospel of “follow the melody” is one of the core ones Queensrÿche faithfully lived by in the eighties. That’s why this is one of the most “European” bands outside 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 thoroughly unfitting genre label, since all their studio albums are quite far apart from one another in sonic and stylistic layering.
“The Warning” marks the end of Queensrÿche’s evolution within classic heavy metal. The very next album, “Rage For Order”, took the band’s expression a big, intelligent step further, offering plenty of new musical looks and challenges, and in the process Queensrÿche didn’t taint their unique singularity and recognizable perfection in delivering melody in their own distinctive voice!
Lineup
Geoff Tate – vocals
Chris DeGarmo – guitar
Michael Wilton – guitar
Eddie Jackson – bass
Scott Rockenfield – drums
Guest:
Michael Kamen – orchestral arrangements
Production
James Guthrie
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
Album length: 48.36
REISSUE BONUS TRACKS (2003):
10. Prophecy
11. The Lady Wore Black (live)
12. Take Hold Of The Flame (live)
Album length with bonus tracks: 61.03
