Qu-I-icon

When it comes to lav­ish record pro­duc­tions, Queen wrote the book.  The sto­ries of the expense and ded­i­ca­tion this group poured into their records is leg­end: they used 4 stu­dios and spent 45,000 pounds to record A Night At The Opera and five years later, they spent twice as much to cap­ture The Game on wax.  The results were always worth the time and cost, as the group pro­duced some of the most lush and com­plex sounds in rock and roll his­tory — and they didn’t even use synths until 1980.

Thus, it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing irony that the group’s debut album was recorded piece­meal, using free stu­dio “down time” sup­plied by their man­age­ment.  First records are often recorded in such dodgy cir­cum­stances but they rarely sound as good as this self-titled out­ing does.  As Queen reveals, this quar­tet clearly wasn’t ready to let time and resource lim­i­ta­tions hold them back — and the fin­ished prod­uct is an impres­sive, cohe­sive dec­la­ra­tion of intent.

Debut sin­gle “Keep Yourself Alive” kicks it off in stomp­ing style, show­ing off the group’s already impres­sive abil­ity to blend shadow with light: the pound­ing rhythm sec­tion and tough main riff hit with jackhammer-style insis­tence but Freddie Mercury’s ele­gant lead vocal adds a touch of unex­pected ele­gance, an impres­sion sup­ported by the choral har­monies and a stun­ning Brian May gui­tar break that sounds like an orches­tra of riffs swirling off into the ether.  It’s the arche­typal iron fist in a vel­vet glove and effec­tively sets the tone for what is to come.

The remain­der of the album explores a vari­ety of hard rock styles, all united by an ambi­tious yet care­fully real­ized style of songcraft and Queen’s dis­tinc­tively artsy approach to the genre.  “Great King Rat” and “My Fairy King” pump up their Tolkien-rock sce­nar­ios with an array of melodic twists while “Doing All Right” and “The Night Comes Down” are bal­lads that har­bor unex­pected but wel­come bursts of multi-textured gui­tar.  The songs rarely stay in one place for more than a minute, always har­bor­ing a delight­ful curve­ball around the next turn that helps them hold up to repeat listens.

The clos­est the album comes to a con­ven­tional rocker is “Modern Times Rock & Roll,” a change of pace penned and sung by Roger Taylor.  He applies his whiskey-tinged voice to a streetwise-cynical appraisal of the music busi­ness over a blitzkrieg melody paced by a wail­ing cho­rus and an abbre­vi­ated but typ­i­cally dense May gui­tar solo.  However, the heav­i­est moment is “Son And Daughter,” a molten rocker that pairs a sludgy riff wor­thy of Black Sabbath with castrato-shriek vocal har­monies on the cho­rus.  Mercury gives a ven­omous deliv­ery on the lead vocal, clearly rel­ish­ing the chance to show off his butch-rocker side.

However, the most impor­tant song on this album is “Liar,” it’s length­i­est and most ambi­tious track.  This para­noid tale of religious/social per­se­cu­tion packs an album side’s worth of hooks and tempo shifts into six min­utes of pure rock opera.  It also boasts a per­for­mance that lives up to its melo­dra­matic grandeur, with Mercury trot­ting all his vocal stylings (every­thing from a whis­per to a scream) and sev­eral scorch­ing gui­tar breaks.  Most impor­tantly, “Liar” makes the best use of the group’s for­mi­da­ble vocal har­monies, allow­ing their back­ing vocals to func­tion as a hys­ter­i­cal Greek cho­rus to its fever­ish sce­nario. The end result is the ur-epic of the Queen cat­a­log, the song that made later oper­atic epics like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Somebody To Love” possible.

Simply put, Queen is one of the all-time great hard rock debut albums because it offers a snap­shot of every­thing the group would be come.  Future albums would elab­o­rate on the style and the elo­quence of its sonic expres­sion — but all the roots of their future suc­cess can be found in this ambi­tious yet focused bill of fare.