QUEENSRŸCHE - Dedicated To Chaos

Indecipherable! That's the only adjective that comes to mind after yet another listen to this latest effort from Queensrÿche. Indecipherable because it's impossible to grasp where the band is trying to go. And it's not a question of genre, since the band abandoned metal a while back, at least since Chris DeGarmo's departure, whose absence inevitably still makes itself felt. After all, it's quite normal for a band with thirty years of experience behind it to want to reinvent itself, and Queensrÿche have long accustomed us to their constant excursions into "other" territories. The problem here is that there's no connecting thread holding the songs together, unlike on the previous "American Soldier", not a great record but at least backed by a solid concept; there isn't even what you might call an underlying "musical discourse". In short, to paraphrase the title, this is a true hymn to chaos - a chaos that doesn't build anything but merely deteriorates.

The fact that the tracks are completely disconnected from one another certainly doesn't make a track-by-track analysis any easier, so it's worth mentioning just a few of the more notable moments, like the opening "Get Started", with its strongly rock-oriented attack that nonetheless lacks real bite, or the following "Hot Spot Junkie", with its nervous, vaguely dark pulse. But these are not the kind of songs you'd expect from a great band that can boast masterpieces like "Operation: Mindcrime" and "Empire". From the third track onward, it's a chasing and skipping about through a genuine sonic jumble in which the listener can find a bit of everything, from dance (!) to rather generic post-grunge, without ever getting too drawn in. It's a jumble that ranges, just to name a few reference points, from the pseudo-new wave atmospheres (the Cure come to mind) of "Got It Bad" to the Pink Floyd-esque closing tracks "The Lie" and "Big Noize" (thankfully, the closing tracks!).

To be fair, the album does present at least two new elements: the first, tied to that musical disjointedness mentioned above, is the fact that it was conceived precisely as a collection of individual downloads aimed at a "liquid" consumption of music, as happens today via the Internet. The titles of some tracks bear witness to this direction, such as "Luvnu" ("Loving You", in the internet's syncretic shorthand), along with some explicit references in the lyrics (World Wide Web, Apps, etc.). The other new element is the rhythmic approach, and this is probably the worst flaw for a band whose distinguishing trait has always been tied to melody and to Geoff Tate's vocal timbre, as well as to DeGarmo's expressiveness (Chris, where are you?). In other words, this is an album centered on the otherwise capable Rockenfield/Jackson rhythm section, which takes center stage on this occasion, while Tate's voice at times risks becoming unrecognizable, rather smothered by the many (too many) rhythmic insistences and electronic samples.

Indecipherable! Nothing but indecipherable, this "Dedicated To Chaos", no matter how open-mindedly you try to listen to it, setting aside any genre-based preconceptions and relying solely on the groove that the record nonetheless gives off (even if it is a confused, latent sort of groove...).

Is there hope for the next record? Given these premises, it's rather hard to say...

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24/08/2011