Note: Condition Hüman is scheduled for release October 2, 2015. For whatever reason, I was able to download the whole album from Amazon.com a couple weeks ago. That download is not currently available.
For almost two decades, Queensrÿche fans have had to worry about whether the next album from “the thinking man’s metal band” will suck, but with the release of Condition Hüman this month, they need worry no longer. The new lineup’s second album shows La Torre and company have command of the sound that made Queensrÿche great.
A quick primer: In the mid-1980s Queensrÿche was an
influential band in the rise of progressive metal. In 1988 they released Operation: Mindcrime, widely considered one
of the greatest concept albums ever, and their next album, Empire (1990), dominated the airwaves. Its follow-up, Promised Land (1994), was also
successful, but Hear in the Now Frontier
(1997) was . . . trying for all
involved and marked the beginning of a period of changes in lineup and style that
divided fans. By Dedicated to Chaos
in 2012, the music so little resembled Queensrÿche that for many fans it was
the last straw--as it was for most of the band members. Soon after, the rest of the guys
booted lead singer Geoff Tate, citing him for the band’s problems. A legal
squabble ensued and the rest of the band won the rights to the name Queensrÿche.
The new lineup, now with frontman Todd La Torre, promised a
return to the band’s heavier early sound and delivered just that on tour and
with their first release, the self-titled Queensrÿche
(2013). This was promising, and Condition
Hüman continues in the same vein with even more polish on the
characteristic Queensrÿche sound. A good example is the song “Guardian”:
The musicians of Queensrÿche are flexing their muscles and
showing off. Bill and Ted of cinematic fame might not be “thinking men,” but I
suspect they would dub this “Excellent!”
If anything is missing from Condition Hüman, it is the experimentalism bordering on unhinged
vision that crops up throughout much of the band’s discography. This is a
crucial ingredient of what has made the best of Queensrÿche so great and it may
very well have come from Tate. Without it, whether the new Queensrÿche can
fully live up to the old remains to be seen. However, Tate--whom the other
founding members claim became increasingly domineering over the years--brought
a slewing, erratic vision that made the worst of Queensrÿche unlistenable for
many who had been hardcore fans.
The new group appears determined to stay the course set in
its early years but to also be a whole band again. Parker Lundgren, who first
joined Queensrÿche toward the end of The Great Iffy years, was given the option of staying or leaving at the time of Tate’s
firing, but if he stayed, he was going to be a fully participating member of
the band rather than just a hired hand, and both he and La Torre have
participated in the songwriting ever since. Perhaps this new cohesion and new
input will lead Queensrÿche to new heights.
If by booting Tate the rest of the guys intended to take
back their band, Condition Hüman
makes it clear that they did just that, at least for those fans who always
wondered what went wrong in the late 90s. I learned to like much that Queensrÿche
released during the controversial years, but I also knew the fear, the fear
that half the songs on the next album might be strange shit out of left field.
Thankfully, this fear is now gone. We no longer need to ask if the next Queensrÿche
album will be good--only how good it
will be.
A previous post on Queensrÿche:
A Casual Review of the Todd La Torre-fronted Queensrÿche’s Debut Album 
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