The reason that I went with RFO was that I think that it had a greater effect on the ProgMetal genre as a whole. The approach and layering of the tracks had a bigger effect on the people that came along afterward. The approach and layering of the tracks had a bigger effect on the people that came along afterward. With Mindcrime I don't see as many progressive elements (outside of Anarchy X and Suite Sister Mary).
Interesting that you singled out Anarchy X, since it was originally written as part of the Rage sessions and was, at that point, titled "Rage for Order" rather than Anarchy X. Not sure if you knew that, but it does sort of support your point in a way you maybe hadn't intended.
Empire is a great album, but it's not a prog album, and I don't see anything on it that someone else had done successfully before. And to expand on that, it didn't signal a shift in the genre, but more of an end to an era.
I'd also point to Roads to Madness on The Warning as a previous use of orchestration by the band.
Okay, but here's where I would say that Empire still fits the bill. And I'm not arguing a point so much as just expanding on what I previously wrote (in other words, I'm not trying to argue that I am somehow "right" as opposed to just providing more clarity to what I posted earlier, for whatever that is worth). I'm not saying Empire was, in and of itself, groundbreaking. Yes, the elements of what was there were already there in their prior music. In one sense, it didn't bring anything new to the table in terms of what Queensryche was doing. But I think that can be said of a lot of bands prior to whatever their "landmark album" is. They have the seeds of whatever was later to become their signature sound or their landmark album. But what makes a particular album special or influential oftentimes is where the band reaches a point in their maturity where they are able to take things they have previously experimented with, and perfect it and take it to another level, oftentimes either with mass appeal or special recognition among fellow musicians in a way where others really sit up and take notice. My point with Empire is that Queensryche did precisely that with that album; they took a lot of elements of what they had previously been doing and found a way to take it to another level, perfect it, and make it appealable to the masses in a way that made what was referred to as "thinking man's metal" an actual thing. I remember that term being bandied about for the first time in Hit Parader and other magazines at the time in connection with Empire. So, to kind of summarize, to me, Empire is THE album (again,
coupled with Mindcrime, because they used Empire to bring Mindcrime to the masses that had missed it, and that also helped boost the phenomenon) that made "thinking man's metal" an actual phenomenon.
That is why I would put it in the "game changer" category. I'm fine if people disagree, but just wanted to put this out there.
EDIT: AL.net ninja'd me on the "Rage"/"Anarchy X" point. But I typed it first.
And his point on what is "prog" is pretty much where I was going in terms of "thinking man's metal." "Prog metal" wasn't a "thing" back then. It just wasn't understood as a genre at that time. Personally, I don't consider QR as fitting definitively within that genre, but as being one of the primary progenitors of it. But it is a fine line and I'm not going to be one of those that pounds the table and draws lines over it. No matter how you look at it, the whole "thinking man's metal" phenomenon is absolutely what grew into what we would later consider as "progressive metal," and QR were at the forefront of it. So that, again, is where I was going with my second point. So...yeah, good discussion.
Topic: Albums that "changed the game" (Read 4090 times)
