Album Review: Queensryche - Digital Noise Alliance

I love when a band's press releases can't even get their own story straight. You would think someone should be reading these things over to make sure they aren't completely contradictory, and yet sometimes we get a situation like the one this new Queensryche album provides. In fact, it's the only reason I'm bothering to write about the new record at all.

In the press release, they say, "Queensryche has always been a forward-thinking band." Though they have been accused of going off the rails several times, I'll grant them it's probably fairly true. Or at least it was, because the description that came along with this record also says the band sat in the studio and pulled out the very same amps they used back on "Empire" and "Rage For Order". Pulling out your old gear to get the sounds you used to use is the very definition of not being forward-thinking. So which is it?

One could easily argue this whole chapter of the band's history with Todd La Torre fronting them has actually been an exercise in looking backwards, trying to recapture the band's signature sound at the expense of the very forward-thinking mentality they say was the core of their identity. It was the right business move, and it has certainly pleased enough of their fans, but it does make them a very different entity than they were, even at the worst moments of their previous incarnation.

As has often been the case, I am rather underwhelmed by what I'm hearing. Not only is there not a hint of the 'progressive metal' tag they were often hit with, incorrectly I would argue, but the echoes of the past do them no favors. The guitars might be pulling in old sounds, but when "Behind The Walls" finds La Torre's voice distorted in such an obvious and artificial way, it draws comparison to the days when Geoff Tate was considered one of the best singers in all of rock. The performance would have been clearer back then, and better for it.

I also hate the underwater, echoing effect put on his voice in "Nocturnal Light". Look, his tone is often difficult for me to listen to as it is, but piling effects on top of it just makes it insufferable to the point I'm not going to bother trying to look past it. I don't know why singers like to hide their voices like that, but I wish it would stop. I want to hear them, not a bunch of plug-ins from Pro Tools.

But all of that is needless nit-picking, since the songs themselves don't do enough to make the album worth listening to. They will probably please Queensryche fans, because they hit the right tones from the past, but I don't hear enough good melodies to carry through an entire album. For both the good and bad, it sounds like a metal album from the mid 80s. That's not my scene.

For this particular approach, I would say go listen to the recent A-Z album instead. Similar pedigree, similar sound, but that album sounded much more like they enjoyed what they were doing.