A Casual Review of the Todd La Torre-fronted Queensryche’s Debut Album

The latest Queensryche release, self-titled, is by one of two bands currently operating under the band’s name. This Queensryche is composed of all the band’s recent members except vocalist Geoff Tate, whom the band replaced with Todd La Torre. The other Queensryche is Geoff Tate and whomever he chooses to work with. I haven’t listened to the Tate Queensryche’s first album, Frequency Unknown, but my expectations for the La Torre Queensryche’s first album weren’t disappointed.

The early releases “Redemption,” “Where Dreams Go to Die” and “Fallout” all immediately suggested the Queensryche fan’s Queensryche circa Empire (1990): heavy, melodic, lots of twin guitar riffs, tightly structured and radio-friendly. I was pleased to find that the other songs on the album were even better, immediately likable, lyrical, and always quintessentially Queensryche. Clearly, the drama of the past year has not taken anything away from this Queensryche other than Geoff Tate.

For some, the loss of Tate is a gain. Many longtime fans have been turned off by the group’s releases in the years since Promised Land (1994), the increasing control of Tate over the band, and a sound that hasn’t evolved so much as gone through mood swings. Dedicated to Chaos (2011)--with its funk, sax appeal and sometimes embarrassingly bad lyrics--was such a wild swing in weird directions that many would hesitate to call it Queensryche.

While I’ve had initial qualms with many Queensryche full-length studio albums, I’ve come to love almost all of those same albums. While they aren’t fan favorites, I consider Operation Mindcrime II (2006) and American Soldier (2009) to represent a Silver Age of sorts for Queensryche after they spent Q2K (1999) and Tribe (2003) finding their groove again, and I quickly realized that the unexpected sound of even Dedicated to Chaos is one I enjoy--once I learned which tracks to skip. Nonetheless, as a friend said after the release of Dedicated to Chaos, with a title like that, you expect some cool-ass heavy, and take the album or leave it, cool-ass heavy it is not.

The La Torre-fronted Queensryche has declared from the start that they intend to base the new Queensryche sound on the old Queensryche sound (Queensryche EP through Empire), and the new release has clearly been designed to sound as much like core Queensryche as possible, even with an appearance by Pamela Moore (Sister Mary from Operation Mindcrime I, II) and production by James “Jimbo” Barton (Operation Mindcrime, Empire, Promised Land). It rocks from start to finish and, simply put, is the Queensryche album many have been waiting for.

Still, it is also new. Scott Rockenfield sounds to have picked up some new moves, or at least a new spirit, spending much of the album pounding out staccato, tribal tattoos with an intensity that reminds me less of recent album performances than it does his concert drum solo. He also appears to have found some new drums. A favorite of mine sounds like a fine-tuned tin pail sounding from the distant corner of an aircraft hangar.

And then there’s Todd La Torre, who is, let’s face it, the make-or-break element of the new album. Longtime fans can be forgiven if they simply can’t accept a Queensryche without Geoff Tate, but La Torre is a competent replacement. He may not be as operatic and theatrical as Tate, but he does have the chops to pull off the soaring melodies, he contributed to the album’s impressive songwriting, and in interviews he comes off as a genuinely great guy.

At some point a judge will decide which Queensryche gets to keep the name, but whatever the outcome, I will be looking forward to this group’s further efforts under any name.

The Devil May Very Well Have Put Dinosaurs Here

One of my favorite musical comebacks in recent years was made by Alice in Chains, with Black Gives Way to Blue in 2009. I was sufficiently moved to blog about it at the time (on a MySpace page I can no longer access), and my enjoyment of the album has only grown in the years since. Thus, I have been eagerly awaiting a new release, and The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here does not disappoint.

Musically, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here grinds along to almost 70 minutes in inimitable AIC style: plenty of dissonance, sludgy guitars, thoughtful lyrics and healthy doses of acoustic chill and melancholy. The new AIC never comes screaming and kicking at you the way early releases like Facelift and Dirt did, but the band has mastered a polish that was inchoate before. Much more could be said about that, but it’s the album title I want to focus on.

The first thing I thought when I heard the title The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here was that according to the logic of common Christian apologetics, the Devil might very well have done just that. I’m referring to the cosmological argument for the existence of God, according to which everything is cause and effect, and since the chain could not go back to infinity, there must have been a First Cause, a Prime Mover, that got the whole shebang going.

Theologians have known for some time now that the argument doesn’t bear scrutiny, but that doesn’t stop Christian, Muslim and Jewish apologists from purveying its poor logic anyway. One of the biggest problems is that even if it proved the existence of a First Cause--and it doesn’t by a long shot, for reasons I won’t go into here--it would not tell us anything at all about what that First Cause was like. It wouldn’t tell us that the First Cause was good, still engaging with the world, or did things like send his son to earth to suffer and die for our sins. In other words, the First Cause could just as well be the Devil--and as Creator, put dinosaurs here.

The songwriters more likely had in mind the belief to which some fundamentalist types of Christian subscribe according to which the Devil put dinosaur fossils in the soil in order to deceive people about the true nature of God’s creation. They believe, according to a literalist interpretation of certain passages in the Bible, that God created the Earth less than 10,000 years ago. Since dinosaur fossils date many millions of years back, the Devil, the great Deceiver, must have put them there and made them look older than the Earth really is.

Obviously, not all Christians feel the need for such mental gymnastics to preserve their faith. I would guess that AIC count themselves atheists, but it doesn’t take an atheist to deplore the ignorance, money, hate and fear that come with some religious strains such as those of Westboro Baptist Church, which AIC clearly takes aim at in the song after which the album is named:

“The devil put dinosaurs here

Jesus don’t like a queer

The devil put dinosaurs here

No problem with faith, just fear.”

Okay, they’re just rock-and-roll lyrics, but I’ll take a voice raised for the side of Good anywhere I can find it, and I’ll add mine to it.

 

 

Han Solo: Space Cowboy and Total Conformist

I was sitting around thinking about Star Wars the other day and realized that Han Solo is the most conformist of the main characters in the films.

On the surface, Han Solo is a non-conformist character. In A New Hope, he is an outlaw who evades Imperial cruisers while smuggling goods in his ship the Millennium Falcon, ejects his cargo into space when it’s convenient, and cares little for political causes or maidens in distress. He is a misfit who exists in the dark spaces between the law (the Empire) and the opposition (the Rebellion), a space cowboy who follows no code but his own--and that code extends only as far as making some cash and saving his bacon.

Han Solo is also non-conformist at a deeper level. Star Wars is more fantasy than science fiction for the way the drama hinges around mythological and psychological archetypes, as well as dramatic stock characters. Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi are the Wise Old Man, Leia is the Maiden, the droids are the Clown, Luke is the Hero, Vader is the Father, and so forth. Han Solo clearly fits into this conceptual framework as the Renegade, but with one important difference: Harrison Ford portrays him too well. Ford brings so much charisma and swagger, as well as emotional vulnerability, to the role that his archetypal function is threatened by significant tinges of individuality. As performed, he does not conform to George Lucas’s aesthetic order.

Perhaps this is what has made Han Solo a fan favorite for decades, and perhaps the style Harrison Ford brought to the role is what lay behind many fans’ negative reaction to the prequels with all the one-dimensional characters and flat acting: No Han Solo, no Harrison Ford, no personality, no flair.

Then why do I say that Han Solo is the most conformist character in Star Wars?

Because this paragon of non-conformism eventually conforms. By the end of Return of the Jedi, he has joined a cause greater than himself, risked his life for others, fallen in love, and become a general for the Rebel Alliance. He will go on in the novels to become married (with children) and a functionary for the New Republic, the new ruling order. As a character in a work of art, he is all the more conformist for having once been a true rebel.

I have always found the scene at the end of Return of the Jedi when Leia kisses him to be disappointing, because when she kisses him--essentially a marriage at the end of all the comedy on Endor--his fall into conformity is complete. He is no longer the Han Solo we have known and loved. Love and kisses, a steady job, and little progeny may be all right for real people, but not wise-cracking, hot-shot pilots who once made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

It is the diminished Han Solo that we can expect from the upcoming movies, set as they are after Return of the Jedi, but if the rumors are true, at least we will have Harrison Ford to play him.

Toward No Ideology

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, I’ve been increasingly suspicious of capitalism, and one strain of my reading has been in revolutionary history and leftist strains of thought. Obviously this means engagement with Marxism, and I have developed some sympathy for many of its concerns. So when it comes to ideology, where does this leave me?

Unsatisfied with the dark side of American capitalism, skeptical that alternate forms of capitalism can make a significant change, wary of drastic solutions of an anarchist or communist bent, and still trying to figure out what socialism could mean in an American context, it leaves me a pragmatist seeking any improvement--even a tweak--that can be made at all, and a philosopher willing to keep thinking, to keep looking for a new big answer to social and economic injustices.

Concerned with ideology, I subscribe to none. Dissatisfied with current options, I seek another. There is no reason that the dichotomy drilled into us by the Cold War--no-holds-barred American-style capitalism versus Soviet-style totalitarian communism--should present the only two possible arrangements for society on a national, international or global scale.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite YouTube clips of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek--someone who appears frequently in this blog and who identifies as “some kind of a communist”--in which he says that in light of all the messes in the 20th Century that arose from attempts to implement big solutions, maybe it’s time that, instead of doing something, we sat back and thought for a while:

Sometimes it’s okay just to think and to leave the perfect, big solution for later. Meanwhile, however, smaller actions can be taken for more modest improvements. And in some places of the world, such as those touched by the Arab Spring, imperfect change may be substantial indeed.