QUEEN — QUEEN II: First Steps On The Road To Platinum Bombast

While Queen was a strong debut album, it sounds pos­i­tively gen­teel com­pared to what they would later do in terms of sonic grandeur.  Queen II was the next log­i­cal step, an album that found the group really sink­ing their col­lec­tive teeth into the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a record­ing stu­dio circa 1974.  The end result found the group real­iz­ing their poten­tial for regal bom­bast on vinyl.  The instru­men­tal intro to the album, “Procession,” tells you all you need to know as Brian May uses the magic of over­dub­bing to trans­form his gui­tar into an elec­tric string sec­tion.  The result­ing track is lav­ish and stir­ring, set­ting the tone nicely for what follows.

Like many ambi­tious albums from the 1970’s, Queen II is divided into two dis­tinct sides — The White Side and the Black Side.  The songs on the White Side was mostly writ­ten by gui­tarist Brian May and they rep­re­sent the sound of Queen at its most seri­ous and dra­matic.  The lyrics stay in the fan­tasy realm but they have a seri­ous tone that is given a strong emo­tional heft by the melodies.  This set of qual­i­ties is best illus­trated in “Father To Son,” a tale of a cross-generational mes­sage with an epic sing-along coda, and the lilt­ing bal­ladry of “White Queen (As It Began),” which has a great “weep­ing” slide gui­tar intro and some pow­er­ful hard-rock instru­men­tal breaks.  Drummer Roger Taylor also kicks in one of his patented tough rock­ers via “Loser In The End,” which expends much hard-riffed blus­ter to pump a plea for parental-child understanding(!).

The Black Side is Freddie Mercury’s domain as a song­writer and it pushes the artsy, bom­bas­tic side of the band to its lim­its.  He’s as atten­tive to tex­ture as May but his style is more flam­boy­ant.  Highlights on this side include Tolkien-rocking jug­ger­naut “Ogre Battle,” a fantasy-themed bit of heav­i­ness that uses at atmos­pheric instru­men­tal break to depict the tit­u­lar event, and “Seven Seas Of Rhye,” a gal­lop­ing rocker that pushes the castrato-high vocal har­monies and gui­tar over­dubs into the red to cre­ate an exhil­a­rat­ing burst of pomp-rock.

That said, the best moment on the Mercury side — and per­haps the entire album — is “The March Of The Black Queen,” a sym­phonic mini-suite that has enough hooks and melodic ideas for at least a side’s worth of songs.  It shifts moods and tem­pos abruptly yet it man­ages to make this work in its own favor, cre­at­ing a kind of roller­coaster effect that remains fresh no mat­ter how often you hear it.

Best of all, “The March Of The Black Queen” gives Mercury a great vehi­cle to give his mul­ti­ple vocal styles a work­out: every­thing from a plain­tive choir­boy tone to a lusty hard-rock voice is deployed here.  The band matches him step for step, using an expres­sive but care­fully con­trolled mix­ture of hard-rock and prog dynam­ics to give the pro­duc­tion a third dimen­sion.  The end result might not have the cohe­sive sto­ry­line other Queen epics have but it rep­re­sents some of their most brac­ing work on record.

This review would be remiss if it did not also men­tion Queen’s cru­cial part­ner in crime on this album: pro­ducer Roy Thomas Baker.  Like the band itself, Baker goes way over the top here, lay­er­ing over­dub atop over­dub to cre­ate a sound as deep as it is wide.  That said, he never loses sight of when to bring a key musi­cal detail into sharp focus: the best exam­ple of this approach is “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke,” a pomp romp that offers a bar­rage of delight­ful tex­tures for the lis­tener to groove on — light­ning fast harp­si­chord lines, vocal har­monies soar­ing towards the stratos­phere and those trade­mark May har­mo­nized gui­tar riffs weav­ing their way through every pas­sage to cre­ate a sup­port for this grand sonic struc­ture.  You can con­tinue to find new details in this tapes­try long after the first lis­ten — and the same can be said for Queen II itself.

In sum­ma­tion: if Queen rep­re­sent a group of future super­stars offer­ing a dec­la­ra­tion of intent then Queen II rep­re­sents that same group find­ing the proper stu­dio voice to use in mak­ing that dec­la­ra­tion.    Queen’s style and song­writ­ing would soon become more focused and direct but they’d never again go as far with the baroque ele­ment of their sound as they do here.  It’s packed with lay­ers and details that make it per­fect head­phone lis­ten­ing and the melodies ensure it will remain melod­i­cally strong on all those return visits.