Ah, a new release from Queensryche, one of the bands that got me to expand my horizons beyond thrash and black metal and to start exploring the realm of traditional and progressive metal. Well, sort of. Not really. After Geoff Tate was fired from Queensryche, he decided to make his own version with a bunch of hired guns and slap together an album in ten minutes to beat his former bandmates to the punch. Decades of pointless albums, a loss of fan interest, the press attention gained from Tate’s firing, spitting on bandmates, insulting audiences, trashing metal and its fans, and ridiculous publicity photos that make him look like he’s auditioning for Mr. Clean, has given Geoff Tate’s career a shot in the arm. Instead of zero people giving a fuck, now a whopping 12 people follow his career just to make daily vest puns on Blabbermouth.
And that brings us to Frequency Unknown. That’s actually a pretty cool sounding title for a progressive metal album. But looking at the album cover I get the feeling there’s some kind of hidden meaning to this title, a dual layer of sublime thought. I curse my Neanderthal metalhead mind for not being able to comprehend the intellectual nuances of Geoff Tate’s art. While this is certainly an album for the connoisseurs of wine and fine art, the marketing for this album promised that it would be “stupidly heavy” and features a mile long list of metal guest musicians to graciously give us groundlings something to chew on as well. So, taken from that perspective, how is FU?
This is the kind of subtle wit that made Geoff Tate and Queensryche leaders of the progressive metal pack.
While this band isn’t the only big name metal band from metal’s golden years whose new material has polarized fans for decades, I think it’s pretty revealing that, much like the new Black Sabbath, the rabid fanboys praising Fully Unnecessary have little to say about why the material itself is good. Instead focusing their five star reviews on how people who don’t like it aren’t “true fans” and dismiss them as “haters” who are “stuck in the 80’s.” For the most part it seems people who are positive about this album think “the re-records are good in their own right”, and probably own a Queensryche Cabaret t-shirt without shame.
Given that the only people sticking up for Fans Uninterested seem to be drooling fanboys, it might be surprising to hear that it is a drastic improvement over 2011’s “Dedicated to Chaos” and Geoff Tate’s 2012 solo album “Kings and Thieves” which were comparable experiences to being fondled by your creepy midlife crisis uncle under the table at the family reunion, and someone taking a diarrhea shit in your ears, respectively.
No, none of the original songs on Fecal Urgency stoop to the levels of cringe inducing awfulness of “Wot We Do”, or “Say U Luv It”. It seems that Geoff Tate finally gets it. No one wants to hear about his nasty grandpa sex antics, or witness his misguided attempts at hip hop, and no one in his audience will ever be able to stomach whose titles look like they were taken off a 12 year old’s IM history.
The bad news is that while Fancy Umbrellas won’t give you rectal cancer after listening to it, it’s not quite “good” either, it’s not progressive metal, and it goes without saying that it’s not Queensryche. I went in expecting Failure Unprecedented but the sad part about this is that if this weren’t such a half-assed, rushed effort, it could have been a fresh start for the tail end of Tate’s career since there’s actually some strong ideas on this album.
Well, the end of the album anyway. The first part of the album tries way too fucking hard to be metal. I thought Geoff hated metal and its “boneheaded” riffs and fans? Although listening to this album I can kind of understand his point of view since apparently he thinks metal is early to mid 2000’s radio rock with more chug, guitar solos and the occasional f-bomb. These songs don’t do much to rise above mediocrity, but they aren’t overly offensive either, saving cringe inducing vocal lines in a couple places and the occasional nagging feeling that you’re listening to a metalled up Nickelback B-side. Y’know, for all the talk from Tate and his white knights about how he’s a deep artist who’s outgrown metal, you wouldn’t expect him to put out songs this generic and soulless. And no matter how many pinch harmonics, guitar solos, or lyrics about what a badass he is in a fight, Tate can’t make this shit sound genuine.
I’m actually a lot more positive about the tail end of the album though. It’s underdeveloped, but the songs at the end have better melody and more emotion. At points on this album Tate proves that while his prog-metal voice is long gone (evidenced by recent live performances and the atrocious re-recorded songs on this album) he can still deliver powerful, emotional vocals when he puts in the effort. A couple moments even remind me of a poor-man’s Bruce Dickinson album.
At the end of Fucking Unlistenable, we have some atrocious re-records of songs off Mindcrime and Empire. Bad vocals, bad mix, bad everything. They do nothing new with the songs and are just inferior versions of the originals. These recordings have no reason to exist and leave you with a bad feeling as the album ends.
The album features a mile long list of guest musicians and guitar solos. For the most part though, none of the solos serve as an emotional climax and are just kind of there because metal songs are supposed to have solos. And did you really need Paul Bostaph to play this shit? If no one told me he was on the album I would have never guessed. The whole thing just seems like a carefully crafted way for the record company to convince people that this is some kind of progressive, Painkiller style shred fest. It’s really not though. To me, the standout of all these guest performances by far was Chris Poland’s solo on “Weight of the World.” If you are obsessed with guitar solos though, you might get some value out of this album. But you might be better served by just listening to some Symphony-X or the new Jeff Loomis album.
If I had to recommend some songs off this album, my first pick by far would be “In the Hands of God.” This song is actually pretty good, and evokes the dark atmosphere of Promised Land with added heaviness. Not glory days good, but it would have been a standout track by far on any of their albums post-Mindcrime. Tate gives a powerful, emotional vocal performance, and the music builds a heavy, moody atmosphere. This is the kind of music Tate should be doing more of. When he tries to do modern radio music (or remake Silent Lucidity with endless shitty ballads), he embarasses himself, and he’s neither suited nor interested in doing old-school Queensryche style screaming vocals anymore. But, when he wants to his vocal delivery can still take a song to a new level and convey interesting moods. The “good” songs off of latter day Queensryche albums such as “Open” and “Dead Man’s Words” tend to match this description. If he assembled a stable band lineup, forgot about Queensryche, and pursued this direction and put in an effort to make a full album of quality songs, I would fully support this. However, I doubt this will ever happen. Like MegaDave, Tate has been chasing the zeitgeist since the early 90s, alternately milking the back catalog, and trying to latch onto whatever’s “hip” with the new material in order to strive for commercial success. The problem with that is that I don’t think Tate’s listened to any new music since around 1996. My second pick off the album would probably be Everything. Like I said, the back half of the album is an improvement over the rest of the material, with the mix of melodic hard rock, metal, and moody pieces being a really good direction if it were fleshed out more.
At the end of the day though, I don’t see myself coming back to anything on this album or adding it to my iTunes, except maybe In the Hands of God. This album was a rushed product intended to let Geoff Tate profit from the band name during the name dispute rather than an artistic endeavour. While it turned out better than expected and the results are even miraculous given the nature of how the album was slapped together, I would only recommend it to die-hard fans of Geoff Tate’s vocals and people who are really interested in the guest performances. Go listen to the new Amorphis instead.
-Tom Falsetto
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