I feel like QR was founded on the idea of being a hard rock band with occasional forays into Pink Floyd psychedelica. Disconnected is a perfect example of that, and it doesn’t even feel like QR to me unless we have those really strange, off-kilter moments.
Great post. I agree that "Dis-con-nec-ted" is one of those necessary, "Queensryche" moments that pushes the band's envelope. You can find them on most of their records - "NM 156", ""Neue Regel", "Suite Sister Mary", "Della Brown", "Dis-con-nec-ted", "All I Want" come to mind immediately for me as examples of that. All tunes that sort of took the band a different direction and pushed the "box" Tate often talked about further open.
I'd disagree, however, on the statement that the band was founded on the idea of being a hard rock band with forays into Floyd-like psychedelia. In all the research I've done over the years, and we've done (my co-writers and I) for the biography over the past two years, my opinion would be that the guys didn't think that far ahead when they were in their initial stage of getting together. They wanted to be a band, get signed, and make a living off playing music. Some of them took it more seriously than others, but back when they were in their teens and early 20s, it wasn't about making a definitive statement about what music their band played. They were simply a rock band, who had influences from hard rock, what was being described as metal back then, and prog/art rock when Tate joined up.
Where I think it got more defined was once they got signed, and had to really develop chemistry with Tate (since he was the outsider), was how to successfully satisfy the creative needs of him, DeGarmo, and Wilton, without losing the interest of Rockenfield and Jackson. And they were really successful at balancing that...for a long time. And that nexus point was, as Tate said God knows how many time in 2012/2013, an "understanding" among the band that there should be (forgive me folks) "NO LIMITS" on where they go creatively. As they got older, tastes shifted, some guys evolved as writers, some didn't. Tate was never a metalhead. He was a prog rock guy. All the other dudes in the band were metalheads...except Chris had a (in my opinion) wider ear for melody and was more adaptable. And that helped him and Tate really develop a chemistry (and to a lesser extent, Michael, although they shifted away from his strengths as a writer toward the original band's end). together.
It was, at least as far as I can tell, a very natural evolution of their songwriting as tastes and needs changed between Tate and DeGarmo. And as you said above, jammindude, they always had that one off-kilter track that really pushed things on each record, to see how far they could go at that point in time.