QUEEN — SHEER HEART ATTACK: The Killer Queen Slays For The First Time

Album num­ber three for Queen rep­re­sented the divid­ing line between being cult favorites and being inter­na­tional super­stars.  Their first two albums, Queen and Queen II, are impres­sive and have aged well but they dis­play the band’s tal­ents in an insu­lar kind of way: putting Tolkienesque lyrics over an eccen­tric blend of har­mony pop and heavy metal is inter­est­ing but hardly a for­mula for large-scale success.

Sheer Heart Attack found the band stream­lin­ing their vast array of inspi­ra­tions and ideas into a cohe­sive pre­sen­ta­tion meets the audi­ence half-way — and thus opened up the pos­si­bil­ity of major suc­cess for them.  The genius of the album lies in its pre­sen­ta­tion: it’s just as ambi­tious in its moods and tex­tures as the pre­vi­ous two albums were but it is much more focused.  The group har­nesses their array of skills into a set of songs that work like a trav­el­ogue through their col­lec­tive imagination.

You could say Sheer Heart Attack is a trip to the pomp-rock car­ni­val: fit­tingly, album opener “Brighton Rock” kicks the album off with car­ni­val sounds before pit­ting a Gilbert & Sullivan-style tune about star­crossed love against a riff-slinging hard rock back­ing.  It’s eas­ily got an album’s worth of melodic ideas but the arrange­ment is sharp as a razor, rolling out its vocal frills and gui­tar licks with metic­u­lous pre­ci­sion.  By the song’s end, it’s obvi­ous that not only does this group have ideas to burn, they’ve also devel­oped the abil­ity to orches­trate them into a style of pre­sen­ta­tion that is as acces­si­ble as it is dazzling.

The next song, “Killer Queen,” dri­ves that point home.  All the key Queen ele­ments are here — the play­fully deca­dent lead vocal from Freddie Mercury, a care­fully orches­trated Brian May gui­tar solo that plays like its own song-within-a-song, art­fully deployed bursts of oper­atic har­mony.  However, all these ele­ments are stream­lined down to a per­fect three-minute pop song. The lyrics tell the tale of a high-class call girl with a know­ing, urbane sen­si­bil­ity that shows Queen doesn’t need to rely on elves and fairies for their sub­ject matter.

The rest of side one main­tains this level of focus, off­set­ting tough rock­ers like the Chuck Berry-inspired “Now I’m Here” with del­i­cately har­mo­nized inter­ludes like “Lily Of The Valley.” It also boasts a great song from drum­mer Roger Taylor in “Tenement Funster,” a por­trait of street­wise rocker-type who dreams about ris­ing above the dis­mis­sive atti­tudes of his neigh­bors.  Taylor tops it with a whiskey-throated vocal that makes a nice con­trast to Mercury’s more regal stylings.

However, it’s the sec­ond side that truly shows off Queen’s new­found mas­tery of their kalei­do­scopic  approach to song­writ­ing and record­ing.  It plays like an Abbey Road–style med­ley, neatly book­ended with two parts of a song enti­tled “In The Lap Of The Gods”: the first part opens the side with an explo­sion of  Wagnerian-gothic vocal har­monies before giv­ing way to a spooky, piano-driven melody, the sec­ond part con­tin­ues the Germanic theme with a beerhall-style sin­ga­long that builds in emo­tional inten­sity and depth of vocal har­monies until it gives way to a lit­eral explosion.

As great as those two book­ends are, it’s what goes on between them that truly stuns the lis­tener as Queen speeds through an ency­clo­pe­dic bar­rage of gen­res and mood shifts.  You get treated to the birth of speed metal (“Stone Cold Crazy”), a sumptuously-harmonized lul­laby (“Dear Friends”), a bub­blegum pop tune built on calypso rhythms (“Misfire”), an adren­a­l­ized throw­back to music hall com­plete with ukelele and standup bass (“Bring Back That Leroy Brown”) and an eerie med­i­ta­tion on romance-as-slavery with wall-of-sound acoustic gui­tars (“She Makes Me (Stormtrooper In Stilettos)”).  Each song is com­pletely dif­fer­ent yet they all flow together beau­ti­fully thanks to the carefully-crafted per­for­mances and devil-may-care sense of dar­ing that unites them all.

Simply put, Sheer Heart Attack is a stun­ner from start to fin­ish, an album that con­tin­ues to impress because it boasts the kind of fear­less tal­ent required to make its insanely ambi­tious ideas work.  If you want to under­stand why this group’s seem­ingly obscure style con­nected with so many peo­ple around the world, it is a per­fect place to start.