Queen for a Day - Son and Daughter

Jeez, guys, Sabbath much? This is Queen at its heaviest. Sludgiest. One of the (few) things I like about this song, as opposed to dislikes, (like freddie's mic...) is the sudden burst into multi-harmonies from the vocals. It doesn't last long but it's a high point and it aims right at what their signature will end up being.
Now, about Freddie's mic...He's modulated way to high and pushed to the point of distortion. He sounds like Julian Casablancas would 30 years later on the first Strokes album. It's a mess. The production here is a disaster and the song isn't much to write home about. The playing is pedestrian, the orchestration sloppy. The song showcases John Deacon a bit but he doesn't have that much to do here besides holding down the sludge.
Skip it. I'm not going to post the original recording. Watch the live version from the 74 Rainbow show instead. It's better. If the song sounded like this on the record it would have gotten a grade and a half higher.

Grade: D-

Queen for a Day - Modern Times Rock and Roll

For years this was my favorite song on what I would have described as a half-assed attempt to be current, schizophrenic debut. It's barely a blip, coming in at under 2 minutes. It's speed metal with feedback, full stops, lightning solos and, surprisingly no drum flash. Given that it was written by a drummer.
Sure, it really wants to be a Zeppelin track. But it also wants to me thrash metal, which predates a lot of that stuff. Roger was always the rock and roller in the band. The guy voted most likely to sleep with models and have babies out of wedlock (I believe he conquered those). He was the one with the candy stripe suit in pictures inside Live Killers. Roger was the guy i wanted to be. He seemed like he was having the most fun. With Keep Yourself Alive, this is as straight ahead rock as this album was going to give.
I dig it.

Grade: A

Queen for a Day - The Night Comes Down

Oh, if ever there was a song that sounded like a band obsessed with Jimmy Page it's this one. Written by May between Smile and Queen it smacks of all that is annoying about 70s frilly-hippy-metal rock. Goofball lyrics ("Lucy was high and so was I), a sound so desperate to be pulchritudinous in it's adoration of the southern california sun-baked music that it just fails on so many levels. Put it this way: if this was the direction the band had followed, in other words, if Freddie wasn't there to take them on a theatrical journey of over the top stadium glam, Queen would have been one and done.

Grade: D

Queen for a Day: Liar

Liar opens Side Two of Queen and it is truly the moment when the band declared their importance in the pantheon of theatrical rock. It's credited to Freddie Mercury but that was mainly because he decided that the lyricist (and hence the writer of the melody) should be the writer of note. But it's obvious that this is a song written by an entire group with a focus. It's closest not to Bohemian Rhapsody, although it is the spiritual cousin of that song, but to Now I'm Here. At the moment I'm writing this I'm listening to a dual guitar solo attack by May that breaks into a percussion based "All Day Long" breakdown. Which, like BoRhap later, is replaced by a crescendoing May led instrumental section. As it concludes it turns into a sort of theater coda, an almost symphonic denouement.
There's no chance one guy wrote this song. Not these guys at this time.
It's a stellar work, however and deserving of ranking among the best of the band's canon.

Grade: A

Queen for a Day - My Fairy King

As we close the side one of the debut album we are privy to the first real taste of the Queen Sound. Multi-layered baking vox, histrionic vocals, triumphant falsetto, balladeering mid-section and some fiery ferocious piano playing (the first we've gotten to hear from Freddie) all result in a splendid suggestion as to what would lay in store. This song (and others on the album) are the real roots for the next album's theatrical style, and it shows Freddie in all his glory.
He would decide, from the lyric in this song "Oh Mother Mercury, see what they've done to me", to change his last name and become Freddie Mercury, no longer Farookh Bulsara.
And a star is born.

Grade: A-

Queen for a Day - Great King Rat

Oh, the 70s. Queen was one of those bands that, in their early days, got caught up in the middle earthian mythologies that groups like Zeppelin were dabbling in. Sandals, middle ages, pomp, etc. While Great King Rat is not about that, per se, it sounds like it should be. It's just a goofy prog-metal tune about an evil dude who died from syphilis. The lyrics are insipid but they work. Because Queen was about not the content as much as the spectacle. They would pretty much invent stadium rock, along with many other greats of the era and this smells of that.
It's also noteworthy in that it changes so many times throughout, tempos, styles, it's less a song than it is a tryout for what would become their signature song, a template for one of the biggest tracks in rock history. It's not the last time this would happen, either.
Great King Rat is Freddie's first written song in the band's catalog. It's got a lot going for it, if it's not a pure success. Like much of their work, it's a showcase for what they could and would be able to do.

Grade: B+

Queen for a Day - Doing All Right

The second track on Queen's debut record is a dribbly ballad that wishes it was Zeppelin but comes across as a treacly ode to the burgeoning California sound. It breaks into sections, falls into a minor key, comes back as a jazzy groove number, it's all over the place and then it explodes for no real reason. It's a schizophrenic as a song could be. And just when you think it's going to go over the top it submits to it's own naive ineptitude and repeats this cycle, playing out as the hard rocker it never was and resolves itself to be a footnote in the band's catalog. Co-written by Brian May's Smile bandmate Tim Staffell, it's the last time an outside co-writer would be included until the band's final year. Good thing.

Grade: D+

Queen for a Day - Keep Yourself Alive

On November 24th 1991 Freddie Mercury died. He was my age. That just really blows my mind...
Queen really started in 1972 although they formed 2 years prior, and, like lightning, were topping the british charts in no time. They exploded here for a while and by 1985 had almost retired from making music. It was the Live Aid show that reignited them. In those 15 years they did everything from glam, pop, rock, metal, dance, you name it. So, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Freddie's death I present Queen for a Day. Each day, one queen song, in released order, in album order. About 100 words and some media to go with it, if I can find it.
Let us begin at the beginning.

Queen - Keep Yourself Alive - from the album Queen - 1973.

Ironic, isn't it? In the end that's really what Freddie was trying to do. But the song isn't about that. It seems to be about not rocking the boat and just keeping status quo to get by. The narrator talks about being told that there's so much adversity out there that he should just keep himself alive and make due. And then it switches in the second verse and the narrator is a success and sated and still unsure of what his goal should be. Basically, it's a paean to avarice, greed and unrest. But that's not what the song is.
What it is is a tour de force, out of the gate, uber-rocker. Hard to believe that this group was just three guys and a lot of power. It's all about Brian May's overdub guitar playing. he would do this throughout the band's career; make one guitar sound like an orchestra, with delay pedals and a genius imagination.
The song COULD fall apart and be just another glam rock, power pop track. In fact, after listening to it back to back with some music of the era, I can definitely hear Bay City Rollers or Raspberries, but May won't allow it to crumble because he's a Hendrixian and those bands never had any of that. And Taylor won't allow it either, because he's as full of bombast as Mercury. This is a song with not one, but two breakdowns. One of them is a DRUM SOLO that prefaces the GUITAR SOLO in the same break! The other one is a call and response.
One of my favorite studio techniques in the song that I tried to find a place for on Throttle Back Sparky's album was how Freddie's voice will trail off and the next line will come in before the previous one is done. It's electric because it's obvious showmanship that never once detracts from the flow of the song. In fact, I think it enhances it.
The track is really a calling card. Queen are here. Deal with it.
It's a showstopper. That they chose to open the record and their career with.
Brilliant.

Grade: A

Listening Post: The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come

The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come - 2009

I've been listening to the 27 part Yale lecture series on the Civil War which I downloaded from iTunes. The lecturer, David Blight, is an expert on the subject and suggests a series of corollary works to read alongside the class.
I am NOT going to do that.
I'm just going to enjoy the lecture and learn what I can.
This is the same approach I am taking to the new Mountain Goats album. Why does it matter? Because every song is named after a passage of the bible and I have no intention of looking them up and figuring out how they relate to the subject matter.
I think that's a little too much work, truly.
This is also the first Mountain Goats that I am really not that interested in recommending. Why? Well, to be honest, it's a little petty. The lead single track, Genesis, was so evocative, the perfect little MG ditty that I was so excited to hear the next collection of songs after the brilliance of Heretic Pride.
But that was not the case. The rest of the songs are so quiet, intimate, difficult to penetrate, that I kind of feel like someone said, "Hey, John, we need a single." And we were given a track that could have been on the previous record.
Look, this is standard issue Mountain Goats. The songcraft is there, the topic matter is there. Its just that this is the first time that I feel like it's a yawn. We've been here before.
Still, there are haunting moments of Goats-ian brilliance. But this isn't an essential Darnielle record in the least.

Grade: B
ASide: Genesis 3:23
BlindSide: Psalms 40:2, Hebrews, 11:40
DownSide: Matthew 25:21

Listening Post: The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride

The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride - 2008

This review was originally presented in Shuffleboil.

In “San Bernadino,” the second track on The Mountain Goats’ new album “Heretic Pride,” John Darnielle sings, “We got in your car and we hit the highway.” A simple line that, through the economy of language that is Darnielle’s specialty, gives away the entire relationship of the couple that has pulled off the side of the road to park at the motel and have their baby in bathtub. A married couple shares their cars. Single people own their own vehicles. It’s her car. It’s their baby. They aren’t married. And they “will never be alone, no matter what they say, [they’re] gonna be okay.” We believe him. Everything will work out just fine. It’s an optimistic piece to say the least. And it embodies everything that is great about The Mountain Goats.





The economy of language. The true power lies in the nuance. God is in the details. Most singer songwriters never get this. Most poets hide behind veils of symbolism and simile. John Darnielle inhabits his subjects and conveys their essences with just a turn of phrase, a specific pronoun, a descriptive Marcus Allen t-shirt. The album’s title is taken from one of the best tracks and in his press release/comic Darnielle makes a point to let us know that the heretic who is empowered by the “reckoning”, emboldened by his martyrdom, strengthened by his physical abuses, dies shortly after the song ends. The author is god to his creations and takes glee and pride in knowing that their lives don’t just begin at the first drum beat and end at the fade out. His characters pre-exist and post-exist in this universe that is The Mountain Goats.

That Darnielle is a master of the music-as-novella is not new information. The “alpha” characters who have been chronicled over the years in various songs and then as the main protagonists of “Tallahassee,” the first album The Goats did for 4AD, are fully formed, constantly evolving people who Darnielle keeps coming back to. Keeps writing about. They are, however, fiction. Making the colossal nature of the work that much more spellbinding.

There isn’t a substandard moment on “Heretic Pride”, though some have felt that it isn’t as focused as “Tallahasee” or “The Sunset Tree”. It doesn’t have a song as shattering as Get Lonely’s “Woke Up New” A MUST download track for everyone who has ever lost someone through breakup or death. This album is more of a collection of songs.




Like “Autoclave,” an urgent and ironically folky retro new wave throwback about a person who is so incapable of love that his heart acts as a dentist’s autoclave, destroying any emotion that comes near it.

Or my personal favorite (of the moment), “Lovecraft in Brooklyn.” In the case of that song, it isn’t a depiction of the famed horror writer who moved to Brooklyn to be with the woman he loved only to find himself more xenophobic and racist than before. Rather it’s how the main character of the song describes his own feeling of xenophobia and racism. He feels “like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.” Darnielle is nothing if not literate. This is Indie rock of a different sort. In a way, John Darnielle (The only real member of The Mountain Goats) is really an heir apparent to Bruce Springsteen. The Springsteen of Yore. When his songs were populated by “the magic rat” or “Wendy” or “Mary” or “The Saint in the City.” Springsteen fans have long lamented that the songs filled with stories of fictional characters through whom we could relate our own lives have given way to solid rockers and a more expansive worldview. Darnielle has remained true to his canon of characters. Creating new ones along the way, he inhabits these people, these works of fiction and, almost never does it feel confessional. Except that he is so true to his subjects that they almost always seem confessional. That is some great writing.




As a whole, “Heretic Pride” is a terrific and rewarding album. It only gets richer with each listen. And, as for a place to start listening to The Mountain Goats (who have some 14 albums to their name dating back to 1991), there really is no better place to start.

Grade: A
ASide: Sax Rohmer #1, Heretic Pride, So Desperate, Michael Myers Respendent
BlindSide: San Bernardino, Autoclave, Lovecraft in Brooklyn, Sept 15th 1983,