I've got no problem with those bands at their prime, but compared to the emotional and inspired gauntlet the ' ryche had run me through just a couple years prior, this seems like vapid audio vaporware, posi-cock-rock wearing a great big happy face. Translation: a lot more.Īs soon as "Best I Can" rolled out of my speakers as a teen, I was stranded in some sort of nebulous cross-worlds of Rush and Van Halen, the one distinguished difference being Tate's familiar cries.
No, really the whole of Empire is ridden with flimsy rock songs, and it seems to lack the unified themes threaded through the earlier full-lengths, not that I mind Queensrÿche decision to step away from the concept album, I only wish they had made it.well, a little more metal than this. I'm not going to lay this all at the feet of the frustratingly catchy sissy-ballad "Silent Lucidity", a song that infested my high school years and the ensuing decade through countless overplay on imagination-lacking video and radio channels, High School proms, and music lessons for aspiring vocalists who were tired of aping "Stairway to Heaven". Queensrÿche had taken a taste of the bubbly with hits like "Eyes of a Stranger" and "I Don't Believe in Love", and now they wanted a larger slice of the vineyard, which they certainly acquired with this album. That's not to imply that Empire is the worst note in the strident and disheveled legacy band has built unto the 21st century, but it's a clear downturn from its impressive predecessor, and even at best, it seems like it was attuned to same the Gold and Platinum defining hard rock audience obsessed with Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, the Scorpions, and other arena-packing leviathans of the late 80s, more so than the prog nerds who enjoyed the two albums prior, or the leather savages lusting after The Warning Pt. Rather, this was some horizontal maneuver into a more friendly and secure realm of radio-targeted hard rock, and I can recall an immediate disappointment, as I was hoping they would take the level of ambition wrought for their 1988 magnum opus into an even more magnified, complex direction which elevated their musical chops and perhaps even retro-evolved with some more aggressive content redolent of their earlier records, fused to the glorious songwriting and chorus strength of Mindcrime. I'm not sure whether Queensrÿche's members were caving into the pressure that their own mounting success might have constructed, or if outside forces like their record label and management team asserted themselves a bit strongly on the group's decision going forward from Operation: Mindcrime but Empire, the fourth full-length, was the first of their albums which didn't feel as if it were a step forward.