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Get your own Free Home PageThey were principally concerned with addressing issues of the world in the beginning of their career. The problem of martial law, a policy that has affected many politically troubled countries, was the message of the song "En Force". Operation: Mindcrime represented well many interpretations of the world from the outside. This album told the story of a man who was manipulated by another man with a whirlwind of extremist ideas against government. Besides politics, the complex narrative featured other topics such as sex, the media, and drugs.
In a lyrical matter, the band first shifted to more inner perspectives with Empire. Its predecessor Mindcrime was fairly opposite in the writing approach. Empire did tackle worldly issues like crime in its title track but also featured how a child dealt with the inner conflict of dream control in the hit song "Silent Lucidity". Love songs including "Another Rainy Night (Without You)" and "One and Only" were about the personal effects of love. In the latter love song, Tate sung his heart out as a passionate man devoted to his woman. "Call for me, run to me whenever you are lonely. Call to me, run to me my lady love" (DeGarmo). The last track from the album is titled "Anybody Listening?". This power ballad hinted among other things, a deep self-evaluation of the band up to 1990. DeGarmo and Tate reflected the view that there was "more to life than what we [Queensryche] have known". What they had known was the hard life of making albums and doing long, exhausting concert tours.
This song especially was a foreshadow to Promised Land, the album that represented the most introspective set of lyrics. DeGarmo explains: "It's dealing with who we are, why we are here, where we are going...I wouldn't be surprised if there's an inner peace that comes along in some way in the whole collection..." In a telephone interview, Tate said: "Promised Land was really an album we needed to do together as a band. It was a direct result [of] our Empire..." Queensryche put their painful personal stories together. Guitarist Michael Wilton illustrated his own experience with a nearly empty plastic bottle of mineral water (representing alcohol). A bout with alcoholism foced Wilton to reevaluate himself. The song "Bridge" was written to help DeGarmo deal with the lack of a relationship between him and his father. The Promised Land ballad was right to the point of expressing emotional baggage with its lyrics. In the song, the father tried to rebuild a bridge with his son which had been blown apart but the younger kept saying that the father had never built it in the first place.
Queensryche gradually stretched their written material. The band has escaped the reputation of writing songs just about the outer influences of the world. In a 1994 newspaper article, writer Bilik said, "for the past dozen years, Queensryche has kept its fans at arms length while railing against political and social injustice." Since then, the barrier has been relinquished. Queensryche continues to break down more boundaries.
As a listener that has heard all of Queensryche's albums, from the self-titled EP to the latest release of Hear, I've been exposed to the band's musical range. The four-song EP was pure heavy metal by the recognizable stentorian sounds of the electric guitars and the fast pounding of the drums. The second album, The Warning, was most similar to it. However, the band gradually made albums beyond the limit of the tumultuous sound.
Rage was a musically adventurous album. A new instrument surfaced in the music---the keyboard. Instead of the characteristic heavy metal, Queensryche sounded like a unique form of progressive rock, which is lighter. The musicians put together a sound which was more mature with two characteristics of the progressive sound---texture and dynamics. Mindcrime was close to the typical heavy metal sound yet was more melodic than the first two albums.
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