Awful isn't a word I'd use to describe Mindcrime ll. Even if it's mostly Tate and Slater, at least it sounds like QR, unlike DTC which sounds nothing like QR apart from one song and can be truly classified as awful.
Yeah, I pretty much agree. It has some definite problems and missed opportunities, and has a few "awful"
moments. In terms of just being "an album of songs," it isn't "awful" at all because there are definitely some very good songs. The problem is, it is a concept album, and those awful moments drag down the entire story, which taints the album as a whole.
Personally, I feel the album is very strong up through Re-Arrange You. Is it Mindcrime awsome? Perhaps not, but it is still plenty solid. But things start to go downhill with The Chase, unfortunately. The song itself is a good idea that suffers because of (1) poor execution (mainly because it just becomes so melodramatic that it begins to alienate a lot of listeners) and (2) carries the stigma of the unfortunately stupid production during the tour that simply cannot be erased from the memory banks once it is seen (which, I suppose, goes back to the melodrama thing). Murderer? picks things back up again and gives the listener some hope. But by this point, an album that was pretty solid up to this point just starts to go all over the place in terms of quality, and a lot of the problem is the shift in focus to the love story and the issue of Mary as Nikki's conscience. To me and many other fans, this idea just doesn't work. Could it have? I suppose. But, again, melodrama and poor execution ruin it. I mean, it's kinda cool that we don't really know how much of the Mary/Nikki interaction at this point is real, imaginary, or something in between. But it just goes over the top and doesn't culminate in anything satisfying, as far as I'm concerned.
There are lots of things I would want to fix if, hypothetically, I were in charge and could take this back into the studio to rework before releasing it. But pretty much anything I would "fix" would have the consequence of taking the story in a different direction. Which, as a tangent, forces me to at least give Geoff/Slater a slight nod for creating a story where all the pieces, regardless of whether they were executed well or poorly, actually do move the story along and contribute something to the story. Listeners can debate all they want about whether any particular piece is a
worthwhile contribution, but that's a separate issue.
Anyhow, back on track, I guess the simplest solution for me is just to eliminate the last track. Get rid of All The Promises, and you have the story ending with Fear City Slide, and not really knowing how Nikki died and what it all meant, which is a good thing. I remember the speculation when the album was new about whether Nikki simply OD'd, whether the explosion sound toward the end of FSS meant he blew up XCorp (or some bigger target), or something else. And that was pretty cool. The ambiguity felt nicely in sync with the themes and intentional ambiguities in the original Mindcrime. But then you have All The Promises, which kinda just makes you throw up your hands and say, "who cares?" Eliminate that song and just put in some sort of outro that maybe musically links the album back to Anarchy X or the end of Mindcrime, and call it a day. Maybe something like this: the original ends with Nikki in the hospital. You have that ominous symphonic fade in that cuts off when Nikki repeats the "I remember now." Maybe the same or similar fade-in, and you hear faint beeps from an EKG machine, and then a flatline tone as the symphonic chord either fades back out or cuts off. Nice, simple, chilling, vague ending that ties up the album nicely without monkeying with it too much. Something like this one simple change would easily bump the album up a notch or two. Problem is, Geoff had his vision, and that was that, even if it ended up dragging the album down. Someone needed to step up and tell him it wasn't a good idea. Problem was, the only people with him for most of the writing, Slater and Stone, weren't in a position to do that. And the result is an album that could have been pretty good, but ultimately fails because a few dumb ideas resulted in poor execution that dragged the album as a whole down with it. That's my take.
Topic: Official Queensryche thread: Kickstart the next album (Read 705518 times)
