Shifting gears a bit, here's a bit I wrote up the last few days on the Q2k era. Been finding some renewed appreciation for that short-lived period lately. I know the below is long, but if you get through it, what are your recollections of Q2k, and feelings toward it now?
The Love/Hate Relationship with Queensryche’s Q2k Era
Back in 1998, Queensryche fans found out Chris DeGarmo had left the band and was being replaced with Kelly Gray, Geoff Tate’s former bandmate in MYTH. There were a lot of rumors about Kelly back then, dominated mostly by the rumor that back in the day he was a big Richie Blackmore clone (he wasn’t with Queensryche), and he had worked with Candlebox and Dokken as a producer.
At the time, I was pretty naďve to just how significant a role DeGarmo had in shaping Queensryche’s sound. All I knew was it was a big hit to the band, and I wanted to see them continue. So I supported the change whole heartedly. Queensryche announced a “fan club members only” show for Jan. 16, 1999 at NAF Studios in Seattle. When I got there, it was clearly just a big rehearsal space, but decorated with the “crowd” artwork found on the Operation: Mindcrime artwork, and the “show area was surrounded by chain link fence, if memory serves. The backdrop behind Scott Rockenfield’s kit was a large Empire-era tri-ryche. Anyway, suffice it to say, it was a pretty cool setting for an “intimate” gig, introducing Kelly Gray.
I got up close to the stage, and was front row between Geoff, Ed, and Michael (Whip hadn’t switched over yet to stage left, he was still stage right). Kelly had stage left to himself. This was the closest I had ever been seeing the band (my seats for the Promised Land and Hear in the Now Frontier tours were about 10 rows back, and the venues were amphitheaters, so there was a pretty big gap), so naturally, I was pretty excited as they started with two of my all-time favorites, “Empire,” and “Breaking the Silence.” I remember paying close attention to Kelly during “BTS,” to see how he played Chris’ part in the solo, and he seemed to pull it off without a problem to me. He seemed to fit right in.
Next they played “Breakdown Room,” which was later shortened to “Breakdown.” My first reaction to it was “wow, that was really heavy,” and I really liked the raw aggression. Queensryche then played another all-time favorite, “Damaged,” so as a fan, I was pretty pleased that I took the chance of flying 3,000 miles in a horrendous snowstorm (my flight was the last one out of NYC the day I had left) to see the show. After that, the band spliced in a bunch of new tunes (“One,” later called “One Life;” “Right Side,” later called “Right Side of My Mind;” “Sacred Ground;” and “Burning Man”) with “Spreading the Disease,” “Speak,” and “The Needle Lies.” The aforementioned “Burning Man” closed out the hour-long set.
I walked away thinking Queensryche was in great hands. The new songs seemed modern, but still Queensryche, and heavier, which appealed to me. The record, which would be called Q2k, wouldn’t come out for another eight months, but with KISW having played three demos from it (“Breakdown Room,” “Liquid Sky,” and I think “Sacred Ground”) that my buddies and I had on a cassette tape, our appetites were whet, and we were content until the release.
Once Sept. 14, 1999 rolled around, like many, I was ecstatic for the new Queensryche record. I liked it and remember liking it much more on first listen than Hear in the Now Frontier (which I’ve since grown to appreciate much more). Friends and I booked a bunch of trips over the span of the next two years to see Queensryche live. I saw the band 10 times from 1999-2001, spanning seven states. It was a great time and I have a ton of wonderful memories from it.
But as those two years wound down, I found myself really starting to sour on Q2k. The songs (on the record) didn’t quite have the same energy, and weren’t as intricate as the rest of the catalog. I’m sure the oversaturation of seeing Queensryche live didn’t help, but a lot of it was me starting to understand just how integral DeGarmo was to Queensryche’s sound. Yes, every record advanced, but all of them had this common stylistic thread, which Q2k abandoned, as Gray became the pseudo-DeGarmo. It wasn’t “bad” at all, but it certainly (thinking back to what I felt near the end of 2001) wasn’t really the Queensryche I remembered, either.
I still had favorites from the album, particularly “Liquid Sky” and the ballad “When the Rain Comes…” which features a really soulful guitar solo by Wilton. I even did an interview with Gray in June 2001 where he talked about other songs the band had written in various stages, including “I Howl” (later released as “Howl”), “Discipline,” and “Monologue,” and was looking forward to at some point hearing them (he indicated some might be resurrected). But after all the drama of Gray’s escapades on the road, and the toll it took on the band (read the liner notes to the 2006 expanded edition of Q2k), I was pretty much done with the record and Kelly Gray era.
Fast-forward to 2006, and past the failed reunion with DeGarmo (which in my opinion, gave us six pretty cool Tribe-era tunes that DeGarmo and the band worked on that linked the band back to the HITNF era but progressed forward), and that expanded edition of Q2k dropped into my hands. It had what would become my favorite tune of the Kelly Gray era, “Howl,” which had some nice Tate vocals, and a real aggressive, driving feel to it.
For years, I’ve always said I would have liked to have heard what a second Queensryche record with Gray would have sounded like. We didn’t get that chance, but I’ve sort of made peace with Q2k over the years and appreciate it as an album. I’ve pretty much settled in the “it’s a good record that got a bad rap because it’s not a good Queensryche album” category.
For me, and my listening habits, I really enjoy the album format, and listening to bands evolve from record to record. When I finally understood in the early 2000s just how the songwriting process worked with Queensryche, I came to appreciate DeGarmo much, much more. I always did, but until about 2000, I didn’t have enough exposure with bands and songwriting to understand just how key he was in shaping Queensryche’s sound.
In reality, at least for me now in retrospect, Q2k was the start of a new band. Yeah, it had four of the same guys, but since DeGarmo really was the “songwriter” of the band (with Wilton as well, but Wilton was more of a writer and co-writer on material pre-Promised Land) who came up with the cool chord progressions, phrasings, harmonies, and worked with Tate on vocal melodies, the essence of what made Queensryche be “Queensryche,” was gone. Queensryche, as I have always believed, was very much a sum of its collective parts. Without one of them, it really affects the overall sound. Like I said, I just didn't comprehend that until later.
And the new band, “Queensryche 2k” just didn’t go in similar directions, sonically, in Queensryche's evolution. It didn't follow a natural path to my ears. It was a stop and restart in a different direction. In fact, it was really void of much in common with the QR back catalog. There was no common thread musically linking Q2k to the rest of the catalog (unlike the EP-HITNF) except for four guys playing on it.
Nowadays, I really find myself appreciating the Q2k album, and the Live Evolution double CD show that caps off that era. Appreciating music for music, I really like Q2k for what it is – moody hard rock with a bit of attitude to it. There’s nothing else like it in my music collection, honestly. Nothing Queensryche did before or since sounds like it to my ears, really except for a little bit of American Soldier, which is to be expected, since Kelly wrote some of that. Even Tate’s version of “Queensryche” (that was a debacle) and the F.U. record really didn’t have anywhere close to that Q2k sound.
So here’s to the misunderstood and dare I say under-appreciated Q2k. Does anyone else find some enjoyment of this one? My favorites from this era (let me go top-5 of the 13 total songs from record’s two releases) are:
1. Howl
2. When the Rain Comes…
3. Liquid Sky
4. Right Side of My Mind
5. Falling Down
Topic: Official Queensryche thread: Kickstart the next album (Read 694587 times)
