I borrowed a fairly new Queensrÿche album from the library the other day, called "The Art of Live". Kind of a self-aggrandizing title, I thought ("We're so good live, we've turned it into an art"), but they used to be one of my favourite bands (as I've blogged before), so I thought I'd give it a try. What a disappointment. Part of my disappointment comes from the fact that most of the songs are from the last few Queensrÿche studio albums, which I didn't really like, and not so much from the first 4 or 5, which I did like. Even ignoring that, there are other problems: the crowd noise is almost non-existent (a live album without crowd noise is just weird to listen to), and there are no backing vocals. This doesn't matter much for some songs, but for a song like Anybody Listening, it really loses something without the backing vocals. I guess Chris DeGarmo was the primary backing vocalist, since he's no longer with the band. Hey, maybe that's the reason I don't like as much of the new stuff — he wrote all the songs I liked too. Another weird thing is that on the song My Global Mind, it sounds like they've shut off the amplifiers, or at least turned the distortion way down — it's not quite an acoustic version, but it certainly isn't as heavy as the original version. I think if it was a pure acoustic version, it would be OK, but it just seems mixed up here. Operation: LIVECrime was a pretty good live Queensrÿche album, but this one just seems to continue the downward spiral of a formerly great band.
I also got a greatest hits album by Silverchair from the library, but I haven't listened to it yet. I will be sure to keep you, Constant Reader, informed. (Kind of a Stephen King thing there)
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