QUEEN II

Queen's best album, save ANATO, and almost a prog masterpiece! While their debut showed Queen as a heavy metal band flirting with prog, Queen II graduated them to a full-fledged prog band, at least for one album.

Procession opens up with Brian May's famous guitar orchestrations that sound like keyboards (this is where it all started!) and leads right into Father to Son. This song is dark, emotional, and heavy. I'm surprised to have never heard it on classic rock stations, this is one of Queen's greatest songs and a classic prog / heavy metal song. The coda, which contains a stadium choir singing the chorus, melts away into the intro for White Queen (As It Began). Beautiful lyrics, lush orchestrations, an almost sitar- like drift in the middle, the heart-wrenching guitar solo make this a beautiful prog ballad.

Some Day One Day is the first song Brian sings for. A decent acoustic-based ballad and slightly dark lyrics, but a bit weak after the first three tracks. The Loser in the End is a Roger Taylor song, great Led-Zep style hard rocker, and some killer guitar parts on this one. Like I said, great hard rock, but it sounds out of place on the album.

Side 2, owned by the late great Freddie Mercury, opens with a backtracked gong, which builds up into backwards guitar and drum riffs that reverse themselves fowards. Aggressive medieval heavy metal, one of Queen's heaviest and most violent, climaxing with bloodcurdling screams. A gong blast ends the song where it began and opens up The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke. Funny, harpsicord driven prog slice with great vocal harmonies that prelude those on Black Queen. All crammed into 2:30 minutes. A piano bit segues into the emotional, but brief ballad, Nevermore. Nevermore is surely a sign of Queen ballads to come...

Then, the epic March of the Black Queen. It comprises all of Side 2, shifting from the overblown vocals of TFFMS, heavy rock of Ogre Battle, and theirs a Nevermore like ballad in the middle. All this and about a hundred-fold more is crammed into a six minute song. Its not only a precursor of Bohemian Rhapsody, but an epic all its own. Black Queen segues into the boring pop-rock of Funny How Love Is (this song is why I took a star away) before the album closes with the short prog single Seven Seas of Rhye.

Overall, excellant album.

Who said that Side 2 should have been one piece. Great Idea!