Every band has an album that is so vastly overrated by the die-hard fans of that group that most others are left totally bemused as to what they see in it. For The Beatles it’s “Revolver”, for David Bowie it’s anything much apart from “Let’s Dance”, and for Queen it is unquestionably “Queen II”. Heresy this may be to some fans of the group, but in my opinion this album is definitely the Emperor’s new clothes of the Queen catalogue.
Which is surprising when you think about it, as with most successful bands the pattern follows the promising first album, mega-hit second album, and disappointing third album route. Queen did things rather differently and kept on building their strengths up until the fourth album, then achieving a fairly consistent run of success right up until the end of their career. But then again, this was never a band for doing things conventionally.
Even taking into account the basic technicalities of an original vinyl release the album is very definitely split into two halves, the ‘white side’ and the ‘black side’, or rather the Brian May side and the Freddie Mercury side. It begins with “Procession”, a short instrumental piece provided as a kind of prologue for the rest of the record and as a chance for May to show off his guitar work. While his skill is as impressive as ever, this kind of solo tour de force is the kind of thing we would do much more effectively on the following album’s opening track “Brighton Rock”, and various other pieces down the years concluding with “Bijou” on “Innuendo” in 1991.
We then get “Father to Son”, one of the longest and dullest songs May has ever inflicted upon the world. While there is no doubting the skill of the instrumentation, the impressive studio production and always-distinctive Mercury vocal, to be frank there is nothing overly memorable about this song. True it does have the classic Queen harmonies and over-the-top prog rock music, but to me the song never seems to quite make up its mind as to whether it wants to be a ballad or a rocker and gets stuck somewhere in between. Which would be OK if done properly, we’re all familiar with rock ballads, but this is just a mess.
“White Queen (As it Began)” is probably the best of May’s contributions to the album, which make up all of the first four tracks, but that’s not really saying a great deal. As always the musicianship of the band is beyond reproach and the production nice enough, there’s just again nothing that sticks in the memory, nothing that hooks you into the song, nothing to get a grip on. I became a Queen fan initially because the songs I heard by the band on the radio were so iconic and instantly memorable, and later as I began to buy the albums I enjoyed the fact that most of their songs really meant something. “White Queen (As it Began)” is a load of old nonsense, which would be fine if it was memorable nonsense – i.e. “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
May sings his first ever lead vocal on a Queen track with “Some Day One Day”, his fourth and final contribution to the album. “You never heard my song before, the music was too loud” he sings at the beginning of the song, somewhat ironically considering the way in which the over-enthusiastic production obscures some of the lead vocals on places in this album, Let’s be frank, May can certainly sing but his voice improved vastly as the years went buy, and there’s a reason none of his lead vocals were released as singles, and it wasn’t to avoid confusion as to who the band’s lead singer was.
It’s a relief that May got all of this sub-standard material out of his system before Queen’s career his the stratosphere. I mean these four songs are all nice enough in their own way, but they all sound so similar and undistinguished – where are the rockers, the goers, the stadium anthems that lift the spirit and set the pulses racing as your blood thins into an adrenaline cocktail? Even the first album, the eponymous “Queen”, had “Keep Yourself Alive”. Maybe the nasty bout of hepatitis May suffered between this album and the following “Sheer Heart Attack” knocked some sense into him and made him realise that he should be writing fast-paced stadium anthems and not poncy prog-rock rubbish.
It’s somewhat galling to have to admit that things take a turn for the better with the arrival of “The Loser in the End”, drummer Roger Taylor’s sole contribution to the album, taking lead vocal duties himself and breaking the May/Mercury writing monopoly. On just about any other Queen album this would be the weakest track, but here the straightforward, if undistinguished, rock track makes welcome relief from the over-produced delusions of grandeur you’ve just suffered.
Taylor was never going to win any singing awards at any point in his career, but he impresses just slightly more here than May did on the previous track and his gravely, Rod Stewart-style voice is well suited to this song, unsurprising considering the fact that he wrote it himself I suppose. At times in his career his voice would slip into the too-gravely ’40 a day’ tone that is rather unpleasant to listen to, but here he sounds bearable enough.
So we move on to the Freddie Mercury half of the record, all of the last six tracks. I think it’s fair to say that at this point in Queen’s career, their front man was still finding his feet as a songwriter – on the first album it’s May’s tracks which stand out as the best, and here it is as if he is trying various different things, exploring all available values before really spreading his wings and beginning to soar as a writer on the third album with awesome tracks such as “Killer Queen”.
“Ogre Battle” begins with a frankly scary bit of a production that almost sounds like one of the god-awful dance tracks they play at those rave things. Urgh. Fortunately it moves on to a fast-paced fantasy-based song with some nice ‘big’ Queen musical touches to it, especially the guitar from May and enthusiastic drumming from Taylor, and for me it sticks out as one of the better songs on the album.
The same cannot really be said of “The Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke”, which from a promising, harpsichord-based introduction descends into stupid farce that in some respects sounds like a re-make of “Liar” from the first album. “Nevermore” is a very nice little piano song, a tragedy that it’s so short when so much space on the record is wasted on rubbish like “The March of the Black Queen” (of which more in a moment). “Nevermore” suggests greater things to come from Queen in the piano-led ballad department in the future, and is a rare shaft of light on an otherwise samey album.
If you’ve not heard “The March of the Black Queen” and for some reason want to know what it sounds like, think of “The Prophet’s Song” from “A Night at the Opera”, only shorter and not as good. It does have one of my favourite lines from the whole album, “going up to heaven and then coming back alive”, but apart from that little sticks in the memory – this is a fault I seem to be laying at the door of many tracks on the album, but I’m doing that because it’s true. Nearly every Queen album has three or four tunes you can hum to yourself after only hearing them once; “Queen II” has only one truly memorable song.
And no, it’s not “Funny How Love Is”, although this could have been a very good track were it not so poorly produced. Oh the music is all very nice, but it’s far too high up in the mix – Mercury’s vocal is obscured, and the normally clear and powerful voice is hidden under the sounds of sleigh bells, so much so that even the harmonies are louder and clearer than he is on his own.
In many sense this is a fault that I would level at the whole album – some promising songs spoiled by a production that is not so much bad as inexperienced. May has said that “Queen II” was an explosion for them in use of the studio, and after going over the top they pulled back a little when putting together their third album, “Sheer Heart Attack”. Perhaps “Queen II” was a lesson that had to be learned, these mistakes had to be made and most of an album wasted so that we would eventually get the all-conquering force that Queen became.
The album closes with “Seven Seas of Rhye”, and as so often during their career they had saved the best for last. Catchy, well produced, powerful and anthemic, THIS ladies and gentlemen is the Queen I fell in love with, not some airy-fairy, up-themselves prog-rock Bowie wannabes. Their first ever hit single, and a faster-paced re-working of an instrumental that had originally closed the first album, “Seven Seas of Rhye” is nonsensical, has a weak ending that fades into a chorus of “I do like to be beside the sea side” and is quite short – but yes, it is also the best song on the album by some distance.
All in all, I think that “Queen II” sounds like the soundtrack to some unproduced epic fantasy movie, and the music would probably have been very fitting if used in this context. However, as a ‘great’ rock album it’s simply not worth considering – they did so, so much better so many times down the years that I find it faintly ridiculous that it is so lauded by so many. Clearly it must have some quality I’m incapable of picking up on, but each to their own. As Orwell wrote, being in a minority of one does not make you insane.
So Queen had largely finished their dabbling in prog rock, bar a few one-offs on later albums such as “The Prophet’s Song” and, erm, “Bohemian Rhapsody” (yeah, OK, I’ll give the proggers that one) and were ready to emerge as the greatest pop/rock group ever to grace the planet Earth. So there!
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