Revolutio POLLing - Operation: Mindcrime track poll

for me this is easily "Spreading the Disease", both the tight songwriting, and the soaring Tate vocals during the chorus.

Leaning towards "The Needle Lies" but I'll listen again before voting.

This is legitimately a great album. Fuck the haterz.

10 albums that changed Geoff Tate's life: never realized he was such a big Yes fan. A lot more prog and less metal than I expected.

He apparently is not all that into metal at all

http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/queensr-che-s-geoff-tate-i-was-never-a-metalhead/

I saw the new La Torre Ryche live last night and they were fucking incredible.

I shudder to think how "Queen of the Reich" would have sounded with Tate in 2019

dear God, this is bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqPMeJchGvU

Speak

I like "Speak" and "Spreading the Disease" a lot but the rush of "The Needle Lies" still won out for me in the end. Lol that Tate can't see the power metal connection. The compact songs work well for me. "Suite Sister Mary" drags a little imo: despite Tate's apparent deep love of Yes and Genesis, I don't feel like their longer-form compositional ideas went that far beyond alternating chorused arpeggios and power-chord riffing, always in straight 4/4.

I never really got the idea of Ryche as a 'prog' band. Somehow after Belew-era Crimson people started to think shimmering clean guitar plus high pitched vocals = prog.

I do agree much of this scans as power metallish

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Going back to this yesterday and paying attention to the lyrics, I was actually surprised by how cohesively the storyline holds together (odd and ideologically vague as it is).

yeah that definitely enhanced my enjoyment of the album once I started paying attention to the concept as it unfolded. they also got good voice actors for the supporting in-between song parts, as well as convincing sounding fake news reports.

i also love when the baddie calls the main character to 'activate' him and says "mindcrime" on the phone, the guitar is also playing underneath it. so I guess the riff is also required to trigger him?

ideologically vague

Yes; I heard this for the first time a couple of years ago, after having read reviews like Chuck Eddy's in Stairway to Hell. A lot of the lyrical rhetoric that he identifies as radical or left-leaning scans as potentially proto-MAGA now.

I have trouble seeing it as making a clearly left- or right-wing statement. The political revolutionaries are actually the biggest villains - terrorists, brainwashers, killers. But it also never contradicts Nikki's original disillusionment with Reagan-era America or the church, which come off as equally corrupt and exploitative. The only positive force is Mary, the exploited prostitute-cum-nun. It seems cynical and nihilistic more than anything. "Empire" actually made a bizarre "we need more cops on the streets" sort of statement, though, iirc.

Fwiw, Tate himself seems like a pretty explicitly left-wing and anti-Trump guy:
https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/ex-queensryche-singer-geoff-tate-i-believe-in-socialism/
https://www.today.com/popculture/queensryche-gets-political-tour-wbna4742694

I believe in socialism and social health care. And I'm for the people — I'm not for the rich people...

Back in late 2017, Tate said that Donald Trump will probably go down as "the worst president" in U.S. history. His comments came two years after he said that he didn't think then-candidate Trump was "presidential material."

That's good to hear, but I imagine he'd agree that lyrics like these read differently now than they would have in 1988:

Got no love for politicians
Or that crazy scene in D.C.
It's just a power mad town
But the time is ripe for changes
There's a growing feeling
That taking a chance on a new kind of vision is due

I used to trust the media
To tell me the truth, tell us the truth
But now I've seen the payoffs
Everywhere I look
Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?

Well, they express disillusionment and a desire for change without having any clear ideas as to how - which can be channelled by left or right. Either way, though, the charismatic leader who responds to this disillusionment and recruits the protagonist for an anti-Establishment movement turns out to be an even greater monster so it's hard to see it as an endorsement.

In that case, maybe it's ahead of its time in creating Dr. X as a proto-Trump!

Here's the Chuck Eddy quote:

It's naive and cynical as any rock-politix ever, but no way is it merely "liberal" - seems they're even explicitly pro-Sandinista.

Geoff Tate says "fuck" weird

it's kind of ard to believe this band put this album together at that stage of their career, because they'd been heading a poppier, more accessible direction on the album previous, with synths and robotic sounds, the Dalbello cover. it's pretty dope but "sprawling rock concept album" wasn't

granted, the ideas on Mindcrime are fairly economical musically, but the arrangements are fairly dense, and so much care and work put into the between song dialogue and themes. they seemed like a band that was going to take the pop direction to increase their notoriety, and instead Mindcrime is the thing that really broke them, the first to go platinum, highest charting album in the US up until that time. which set up Empire as their New Jersey, which charted higher and sold more but ultimately disappointed fans