EMPIRE

When a band reaches a landmark album album, such as Queensryche's 'Operation Mindcrime', makes it very hard to create a follow-up. 'Empire' was a far different album, for good, they decided not to try the same sound. The negative to that, was Queensryche weren't really Queensryche anymore.

One of the reasons this album wasn't another masterpiece was because of the change in Geoff Tate's vocals. His energy was essential to the band's sound, without his over the top vocals and broad range, it felt like things just weren't the same. Complimentary to this, Chris DeGarmo's guitar work wasn't over the top either; there was more of a simple hard rock sound rather than metal, or an artistic metal at that. Those two criteria resulted in a mostly watered down and bland work. The band was able to touch up a bit on some old classics with songs like 'Best I Can' and 'Another Rainy Night'. This album also contains Queenryche's best known song called 'Silent Lucidity'. I'll admit it is a good song and had the potential to be big on the radio, which it did, but it really sounded like a Queenryche plays Floyd song. Regardless, they did do a nice job arranging a song with a lot of radio potential and succeed.

This album holds some good numbers, so it is still worthy of 3 stars. If you already heard Mindcrime, look backwards from there before you go forward, otherwise it will be a big disappointment.

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