Ravi Philip Rajkumar

One step forward, two steps back...

Queensryche is best known for the rock opera Operation: Mindcrime and the mainstream smash Empire, but Rage for Order is an essential inflection point in their career. It marks their transition from an Iron Maiden-influenced power metal band with JRPG lyrics (The Warning) to a hard rock / metal band with more conceptual and experimental aspirations. This album was the beginning of a wave they rode all the way through to 1994's excellent Promised Land. Though their subsequent career has been largely lackluster - marred by questionable songwriting choices and internal strife - the four-album salvo that QR launched from 1986 to 1994 was one hell of a career peak. And RFO is where it all began. Some Internet pundits have claimed that RFO is a concept album, but they seem unclear on what the concept is. Is it a sci-fi story based on 1984 but with more computers involved (yawn)? Or a vampire love epic (retch)? Honestly, it's hard to discern a single concept, and attempt to retcon one in are far from convincing. What we have is simply a great collection of songs, covering the usual power / prog-metal themes - war and civil unrest, technology gone rogue, a few fantasy tropes - and a couple of twisted, stalker-ish "love" songs for good measure. There are plenty of neat little touches - the synth-pop elements on the Dalbello cover Gonna Get Close to You, the eerie backing vocals on The Whisper and Screaming In Digital, the slow-burn build up on London, the 12-string acoustic intro on Neue Regel - and a good deal of diversity in the arrangements, ensuring that things never get too monotonous. Of course, there are moments where the drama levels may be hard to swallow for some (The Killing Words, Chemical Youth) but the songs are so good that one can overlook this, and Geoff Tate's vocals have seldom sounded better. Picking a best track is hard, but I would vote for the closing ballad I Will Remember ("a nice ditty about spy satellites", as one band member memorable called it) - it's a far better song that its successor Silent Lucidity, and has far better lyrics and vocals. One of the three albums seriously in the running for QR's best ever.

After the dissolution of Soundgarden amidst burnout and "creative differences", Chris Cornell came out with his first and best solo album. Trading the alternative-meets-metal heaviness of his former band for a more bluesy, soul-tinged, acoustic singer-songwriter style, Cornell makes the leap effortlessly ("Can't Change Me", "Wave Goodbye", "When I'm Down"). He even manages to beat Radiohead at their own game in the melancholy "Fake Plastic Trees" rewrite "Preaching The End Of The World". Traces of the old "hardness" appear on "Mission" and "Steel Rain", which would have fit in quite neatly on "Down on the Upside". There is hardly a weak track in sight (though the tempo does slacken a bit after the first seven tracks) and there's even a bit of humour on the bonus track, which is "Can't Change Me" reimagined in chanson (French pop) style and some, ahem, interesting French pronunciations from our favourite rock hero. Cornell would record a lot more solo material, but he never quite managed to top this excellent disc.

An important question to keep in mind when "rating" a book of this sort is: does a disappointing final 5% ruin an otherwise fine preceding 95%? Disappointment is, of course, often in the eye of the beholder - but one is left with the sense that the author's love of "shocking swerve" endings (M. Night Shyamalan has a lot to answer for!) has outstripped both his strengths as a writer and the tale he was telling until then. Papal conclaves are fascinating from a thriller writer's perspectives. Though ostensibly a pious exercise guided by the Holy Ghost, even the most devout Catholic today knows that they are often unedifying exercises in horse-trading, chicanery and manipulation more reminiscent of the lowest form of "secular" politics. Add to this the endless opportunities for scandals (sexual, financial or otherwise) that could dethrone a "papabile"'s chances, and the possibility of unexpected external events disrupting the cozy deliberations of a group of celibate, elderly men, and you have a very promising premise for a page-turner. In short, exactly the sort of thing that Robert Harris should be able to pull off. And he almost does. It's a pity that the desire to make a Statement - and to make it in the most blatant and taped-on manner possible - details what is otherwise a very fun read. Still, "to err is human - to forgive divine", and the journey is entertaining enough that one can forgive the rather ludicrous destination. I only wish a good editor had talked some common sense into Mr Harris' head before this went into print.

A load of mediocrity. Even if the Black Album leaned towards a "commercialized" sound, it was still a recognisable and admirable heavy metal album full of good songs (Wherever I May Roam being my pick for best track) and interesting twists on the old Metallica tropes. This album, however, is just average. It is "meh" translated into soft grunge-metal. The band themselves acknowledge this by trying to distract from the dull music with childish attempts to shock - including Kirk and Lars flirting with homoeroticism and the nauseating cover art. The actual album is just a blend of boring alt-rock (Hero of the Day, Mama Said), boneheaded one-dimensional metal (King Nothing) and trying to jump on the "songs about shooting sprees" bandwagon that Eddie Vedder rode to questionable fame (Ronnie). There are a few good songs (Until It Sleeps, Outlaw Torn) and nothing truly offensive, but this was the beginning of a huge career slump for a once great band - one that they wouldn't fully emerge from until 2007.

A Tale of Two Albums By Dom Sheldon Dickens It was the best of albums - no, literally, it includes a "best of" collection - it was the worst of albums. Disc 1 is, of course, a greatest hits collection that captures a more innocent age of Jackson fandom - a period where one could simply enjoy the transition from disco to pop to an eclectic mix of rock, pop, rap and R&B, and not worry about any sort of subtext. Disc 2, though, is just a whiny mess. There are some good moments musically - this is Michael Jackson and his crack team of collaborators after all! - but the record is pretty much ruined by the awful lyrics, vocals, and tone. From endorsing the "Africa is a country" myth on Earth Song, to trying his hand (and failing) at sampling on the title track, there is little to write home about. 'Tis a pity, because MJ as singer-songwriter had a lot of promise ("Stranger in Moscow", "Earth Song"). The vast majority of the new material is whining about how he has been treated unfairly by the media, the public, and the legal system. Worse, MJ attempts a sort of gangsta, tough-guy posture (complete with a guest rap from Biggie, a diss track that ends with a gun shot, dropping an F bomb, anti-Semitic dog whistles, and complaining about how "the system sucks"). Remember when Yakky Doodle tried to change his name to Nailgun because he wanted to sound "tough"? This is the same. It comes off not as tough or defiant, but as a toddler trying to ape his dad by drawing a beard on his chin with magic marker. And don't get me started about the atrocious "Little Susie", a morbid dose of treacle that even the Victorians would have shrunk from. MJ also tries, with an equal lack of conviction, to occupy the lover-man role on the syrupy "You Are Not Alone". One can only imagine what sort of persuasion the cult of $cientology used on poor Lisa Marie Presley to make her participate in the train-wreck video for this song...all to no avail, as they failed to recruit Mikey in the end. Oh, and did I mention that this song was the brainchild of convicted sex offender R (short for rape) Kelly? Blech. We still haven't addressed the elephant in the room: this album was a sort of call to arms to the most rabid and delusional of MJ fans to defend him and attack his detractors no matter what. If you think Trump fans are bad, you haven't met a crazy MJ fan - their conspiracy theories make Q sound like a cute nursery rhyme. If you don't believe me, visit an MJ fan blog - just make sure you scrub your browser history and hard drive afterwards. And this "don't blame me, blame the rest of the world" record is what spawned them. 3 stars for the old (and mostly good) songs; none for the new; minus 1 star for begetting a fandom that still swarms any rational discussion of MJ like the Zerg, precluding any realistic appraisal of his flaws. That yields 2 stars. Arithmetic doesn't lie, even if Hollywood lawyers do.

Pearl Jam - as Weird Al will remind you in his hilarious song about Eddie Vedder - don't generally do "happy". Angry, yes. Frustrated and disillusioned, yes. However, by the time they released their last album - 2006's excellent Avocado Album - they were making a conscious effort to distance themselves from the angsty stereotypes that have dogged them since their debut. That album ended with an unabashed positive affirmation ("Inside Job") - and Backspacer picks up pretty much where that song ended. We open with a triad of optimistically themed punk-pop songs, move on to a fun but of self-mockery ("Johnny Guitar") that almost recalls said Weird Al song, and then get treated to perhaps their best and most unabashed love song in "Just Breathe". (Said song is of such a high calibre that at least one country and western luminary has covered it unironically.) After that, there's an ode to surfing from self-professed "gas station surfer dude" Vedder, and the centrepiece of the album in "Unthought Known", which is just one big emotional high from start to finish. Things slow down a bit after that, though we do get one superb power-ballad in "Force of Nature" before ending on a downer (shock!) with reflections on mortality in "The End". The whole album works well as simply a great collection of punk-influenced hard rock, but it works even better as a chronicle of individual and band maturity - one that they are yet to top at the time I write this.

After an album that flirted dangerously with the dreaded tag "MOR" (though not without its bright spots), this album is a welcome return to form. The lyrical and musical edges are back, there is more emotion involved, and there is even a nice mix of styles - from the cheerful show tune "Loving You Is Easy" to the more charged-up "Awakenings" and the dream pop of "Love Come". Laws of Illusion is a "breakup album", but it's not just angst or bile: there is plenty of food for reflection in songs like "Out of Tune", "Illusions of Bliss" and "U Want Me 2" (the latter of which is a very clever use of the 2 / too / to homophone). As good as Fumbling Towards Ecstasy or Surfacing - perhaps even better at times.

A worthy successor to "Priest=Aura" with a surprising and heartwarming finale, this is a consistently good album that sees the band back in form with just the right mix of sonic textures, phantasmagoric lyrics and free-flowing song structures. Picking a best song is hard, but the haunting, largely spoken "Great Machine" is as good as it gets, and the chilling elegy "This Is It" turned out to be eerily prophetic.

Often derided as "Dream Theater's stab at commercial success" (with two 10+ minute songs? really?) and plagued by a troubled production (Desmond Child belongs on a Dream Theater album as much as Mao Zedong does in the Sistine Chapel), this is nevertheless a fairly good album and in many ways a forerunner to the career peak of Metropolis Part II. Though I agree with DT's own Mike Portnoy that the album would be improved by better arrangement and less record label tampering (and You Not Me is awful - someone please exile Desmond Child to a labour camp in China, please) there is nevertheless a lot of great material here. The band comes out of the gates strongly with New Millennium (Chapman Stick FTW!), ends with a melancholy epic in Trial of Tears, and contains two excellent ballads (Anna Lee and Hollow Years) that put every bit of sap on The Astonishing to shame. While the angsty "I hate the music industry and am a tortured artist" shtick of Burning My Soul and Just Let Me Breathe gets tiresome (if I want this stuff, Pearl Jam did it better on Vs.), songs like Peruvian Skies and Lines in the Sand are good examples of DT achieving a progressive rock/metal sound without the excesses that would characterize their post-1999 output. Recommended, but just skip You Not Me and ignore the lyrics on the "angsty" songs mentioned earlier. 4/5