QUEEN II

A bombastic epic album, this one is by far QUEEN's finest hour. If you like music mixed with emotions, anger, happiness, sadness all mixed on a prog cauldron with the sweetest epic taste of wonderful music, this album is the right one for you.

Queen II floats between volcanoes of quasi-metal pieces like "Ogre Battle" and heavenly clouds of heart-filled compositions such as "Nevermore" and "White Queen". The album's variety of moods and ideas is impressive, it has an epic and medieval feel only found on monsters of symphonic rock such as GENESIS and KING CRIMSON. "Father to Son" is a delicate and heavy piece that swings between burning guitar sections to moving vocal lines by Freddie. "White Queen" is possibly the band's most beautiful work, it can bring tears to you eyes and is the best track on Side 1. "Some Day, One Day" is very Simon and Garfunkel like, and it is a very delightful song. "Loser in the End" is another gem and very underrated, it is a conventional rocking song showing the great vocal skills of ROGER TAYLOR, closing side 1 perfectly. But the best is still to arrive. Side 2 consists of a group of songs that could have been joined together to form a prog epic, since they are all organized together as a full piece. "Ogre Battle" is QUEEN's weirdest and most violent number, leading to the very dense "Fairy Tellers" where we can see how versatile FREDDIE is as a vocalist. "Nevermore" is more effective than the overrated "Love of my Life", and "March of the Black Queen" is QUEEN's magnum-opus, also more effective and longer-lasting than "Bohemian Rhapsody". "Funny How Love Is" is a cheerful track that closes the epic, leading to the single "Seven Seas of Rhye", another short song but very dense and incredibly prog-ish like "Fairy Teller's". This side was entirely written by MERCURY, showing what amazing singer and composer he is, his prog talents are far more sublime then i expected. A very talented artist, for sure.

The variety of themes on short song, the creativity displayed here and the epic feel this album has make this QUEEN's best and most prog work. ANATO is great too, but this one is their most powerful piece, over the top, and one of the most important gems on prog, which is sometimes overlooked by prog fans who generally don't dig bands like QUEEN which despite never having made an entire prog career (but did YES and GENESIS?), had a prog era of a charm and quality few bands of its time could equal.

RIP Freddie, we admire you.