QUEEN – Heavy (2025) *HQ*
UMG Recordings started the release of QUEEN‘s thematic series compilations, grouping songs in the same musical style from the band’s 3-decade career catalog. Especially compiled and overseen by Brian May & Roger Taylor, here’s the titled “HEAVY” volume.
Let’s not forgot that for all the cod-operatic epics, billowing ballads and diversions into funk, blues, musical hall and pretty much every other genre ever invented, in their origins Queen were a hard rocking band. And they continued to record at least one guitar-driven song on each album.
It’s not surprising that most of these songs never were singles, not radio-friendly, but quality ‘inside tracks’. It’s great to have these all together, all selections remastered.
Opening is one of our favorite Queen songs, ‘Ogre Battle’ (1974), from one of our fav Queen albums, “II”. Lyrically Queen’s first two albums were based around Freddie Mercury’s epic, fantastical bespoke mythology of kings and queens, senators and messengers, fairies and ogres. It culminates in this thrilling tale with a spectacularly metal title reflected in its pulverizing proto-thrash riff and furious gallop, plus a dizzying backwards intro and the screaming, clashing sound of giants in combat.
Rumbling seductively on a gargantuan Tony Iommi-school doom riff (later half-inched by sludge hooligans Iron Monkey for their song House Anxiety), Brian May’s 1973 ‘Son And Daughter’ is a dirty stoner blues metal snarl with an impassioned thud and unusually direct lyrics (“The world expects a man to buckle down and shovel shit”).
A proto-Run To The Hills protest song about the massacre of native Americans by invading paleface imperialists; as befits its sombre subject ‘White Man’ (1976) is dark, doomy, brooding and scornful, with a powerful percussive stomp, wailing leads and a simple but ineffably mighty riff. Freddie once introduced it live as “A real bitch of a song, it really gets to the nodules.”
An artful spoof of the flourishing punk trend – which in 1977 had relegated Queen to has-been status at 30 in the eyes of the inverted-snob rock media – ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ offers a perfect sonic realisation of an album title from ‘74, with blistering jackhammer guitars, a frantic rasping beat and lyrics bristling with wry teenage disaffection cliches (“I feel so inar-inar-inar-inar-inar-inarticulate!”).
‘Dead On Time’ (1978) is a great song. An overlooked energetic deep-cut from Queen’s last album of the ‘70s was virtually beating a path towards speed metal, or a glam rock stomp at five times the speed, voltage and adrenaline. Piled high with May’s heroic fireworks, Taylor’s whirling elastic fills and Mercury’s rapid-fire delivery, the HM quotient is ramped up even further by the “You’re dead!” thunderstorm ending.
Sequenced for maximum impact – blasting in all guns blazing after the soft fade on Freddie’s light-hearted love song to his cat, Delilah – Innuendo’s 1991 ‘The Hitman’ aggressive opening volley of insistent chords and meaty, swaggering riff perfectly express the violence of the ruthless gun-for-hire lyrics, thought by many to be the frontman’s veiled reference to the HIV that was soon to take his life.
Queen rocks too, and Brian May’s guitar playing & sound became a trademark in Rock history. All that is represented here; this is Queen at it most rocking from the ’70s to the ’80 & ’90s.
Highly Recommended
01 – Ogre Battle (Remastered 2011)
02 – Stone Cold Crazy (Remastered 2011)
03 – The Hitman (Remastered 2011)
04 – Sheer Heart Attack (Remastered 2011)
05 – Princes Of The Universe (Remastered 2011)
06 – Son And Daughter (Remastered 2011)
07 – Dead On Time (Remastered 2011)
08 – Liar (Remastered 2011)
09 – White Man (Remastered 2011)
10 – Headlong (Remastered 2011)
Freddie Mercury – lead vocals
Brian May – electric guitar, backing vocals
Roger Taylor – drums, backing vocals
John Deacon – bass
BUY
music.apple.com/de/album/heavy/1821310092
