Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The artistic endeavour behind a fully immersive concept album is one that for the most part is sadly lacking from today’s required listening; even the concept album itself, aside from being practised by a few hardy souls, seems to have fallen by the wayside.
It seems to be instead, simply okay to sew together a few loose threads under a banner of tropes and ideas and place it under the banner to which so many in the past have sweated over the construction and assembly of a story which resonates, which has its own lengthy pulse sharpened, the structure of the machine whirring as the introduction, the rise and fall of the protagonist unveils a masterpiece with no illusion, only painstaking beauty at its heart.
Think of the concept album in its truest form and you immediately think of classics such as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, the seminal Misplaced Childhood by Marillion, Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, Green Day’s American Idiot, The Who’s Quadrophenia, and various offerings by Rick Wakeman, The Alan Parson Project, Jethro Tull and others; they all capture a moment of the last fifty years in which human expression in art was pushed beyond the stifling, almost constricting imposed borders of the three minute song, and allowed, encouraged to blossom.
One such album that not only fitted the pattern of the concept but destroyed the surroundings of the comfortable passive inclusion with glorious impunity was Queensrÿche’s Operation:Mindcrime, an album that at times almost matches impossibly the sheer scale brought by Pink Floyd and Genesis in their aforementioned releases. It has at its centre a tale of alienation and of the unknown quantity of political and religious assassination doctrine which for many was not only a subject that would have been taboo, but one in which the band, especially Geoff Tate as the sung thoughts of the protagonist Nikki, sought to confront the evil of corruption that has been prevalent in American Society since the days when John F. Kennedy was shot, assassinated by persons unknown.
There is no argument that Operation:Mindcrimeis more than a classic, that tracks such as Speak, Spreading The Disease, The Needle Lies, I Don’t Believe In Love and Eyes Of A Stranger stand tall and overshadow, rightly or wrongly, almost anything that the band placed before the listener since; however in the deluxe re-release, the sense of over embellishing the range and beauty of the music is captured by the plethora of sameness felt.
Across four audio discs and one DVD, Operation:Mindcrime becomes somehow slightly, and unfortunately, less the sum of its whole; it is still incredible, it still gets under the skin and makes the listener understand the point of structure, of offering more than a gesture to the genre, but it just seems…overkill, seven bullets in a chamber built for six, five large slices of hot apple pie brought to a table of four.
The deluxe album release may the exception that proves the rule of the re-release, if it doesn’t offer a different angle to the original, then why pursue it, why compound the listener’s attention and love of the original.
Thankfully it is doubtful, near on impossible to find a fan of the band who would ever lose respect for the performance of Michael Wilton, Eddie Jackson, Scott Rockenfield, Chris DeGarmo and Geoff Tate or for the themes and structure, of the highly polished production behind the album, and whilst the deluxe edition in this case might be seen as too much of a good thing, Operation:Mindcrime will forever be a giant striding the world of Progressive Metal, of the land of the concept album.
Ian D. Hall