My first thought when I heard Queensryche was releasing another compilation album was “christ, didn’t they just do this fifteen minutes ago?” Okay, it was more like four years earlier, but the Capitol Records 12-track Classic Masters contained no new material, and was essentially useless; the 2000 compilation Greatest Hits was barely passable, with two non-album tracks. So is the 2007 stab at the same thing just another ploy to get the masses to buy another “Silent Lucidity plus other tracks” CD?

Well, no. There is some confusion, however. First, the title of the album is the same as the title of a previously-released CD single. Also, if you get the album from iTunes, it’s titled The Best of Queensryche and two songs are substituted. (Don’t worry, they are from Q2K and Mindcrime 2 - you’re not missing anything.) Also, there is a regular, 17-track, single disc version - that is fairly worthless, with the exception of “Real World,” a decent track that originally appeared on the Last Action Hero soundtrack and involves a heavy amount of Michael Kamen orchestration.

The real “meat” of this collection is a second CD that only appears in a “collector’s edition,” and that is loaded with a whopping 15 tracks of new, non-album goodness. Here’s the rundown:

• “Take Hold of the Flame,” “Walk In the Shadows,” and “Before the Storm” - These are all demos made by the band when they were still called Myth, and were previously unreleased. The band only sounds vaguely like Queensryche from their first EP, and more resembles early Fates Warning. Other than the titles, the songs bear absolutely no resemblance to their later studio editions. I can’t say I will listen to these over and over, but it is awesome to hear the band lay down some early progress for us to hear. (Note: if you bought from iTunes, these will be labelled as Myth tracks, so don’t fret if they don’t show up in the Q section of your music library.)
• “Waiting For the Kill,” “No Sanctuary,” and “Prophecy” - These are all demos from The Warning, and they’re different songs, but there are bits and pieces that were clearly reused elsewhere. For example, solos and big chunks of “Waiting” end up becoming “NM156.”
• The acoustic version of “I Dream In Infrared” from the Rage For Order sessions. Cool, but it’s been released as a b-side at least once or twice before.
• “Della Brown” from the Unplugged session, and “Silent Lucidity” live, from a B-side for “Bridge.” You probably own ten copies of these also.
• The I-have-many-times b-sides “Chasing Blue Sky,” “Someone Else?” with full band, “Scarborough Fair,” and the Empire-era “Dirty Li’l Secret.”
• From the Ford Fairlane soundtrack is “Last Time in Paris,” which was a b-side from one of the Empire singles. I’d totally forgotten about this song! It’s one of those windows straight back to 1992 when I picked up the single, and a very catchy tune.
• “Justified” - a completely new song, unreleased elsewhere. I’m not sure when this is recorded, but it’s got an excellent sound to it, and it’s almost worth the price of admission.

Overall, this is a decent collection, and the rarities make it a decent value. I don’t think of Queensryche as a band with a lot of odd material in the attic, but if you want to get it all in one swoop without spending tons on rare singles and bootlegs, this is the way to go.

Rating: 8.5

A fractal is a geometric shape that has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales, and is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language. That’s also a decent description of the latest release from the Bay-area quartet Fractal, because this sixteen-track album is a cohesive musical work with a focus on great detail and complex composition, but offering a wide swath of style.

Last time around, on 2003’s Continuum, the band was an instrumental trio (Nic Roozeboom on guitars/synth, Jim Mallonee on bass/synth, and Paul Strong on drums). This time, Josh Friedman comes to the fold on vocals and guitar, and the band pulls away from their previous instrumental moorings to explore new territory. If there’s any comparison to be made between this effort and Continuum, the prior album had more of a fusion-y freeform feel to it, while Sequitur is much more structured and focused.

Friedman’s lyrics pull the compositions in another direction, with some of the numbers being almost ballady, in working with his vocals. A good example of this is “Giving Tree,” which is a very smooth and conventional ballad. It’s not something you’d expect from a band that’s usually flogging out full-bore in an irrational meter with notes all over the page. But it works well, and it’s an enjoyable piece.

In a similar vein is one of my favorite tracks is “A Fraction of One.” I’m a huge Peter Gabriel fan, and this draws from the same type of phantasmagorical lyrics over an ethereal soundtrack you’d find on the first few of Gabriel’s albums or in his soundtrack work. The song builds to an evil crescendo, with the guitar thrumming away, and the conclusion marked with the gong of an ancient clock. It’s an example of a completely different direction than the earlier three-piece instrumental recording.

There are a couple of interesting diversion that veer away from the center of the prog-rock highway. One is “The Monkey’s Paw”, which has angsty lyrics sung like a 90s alt-rock band, but draped over a complex beat that slowly spirals into a speed metal guitar solo. The band gets back into the fold with the big payoff, the three-part “Churn”, which ends with an almost electronica-oriented zip through with a trance-like synth beat, and a very screaming, fusion-esque guitar solo that I enjoyed.

This isn’t a straightforward album that everyone is going to “get” on the first listen, but that’s a big part of its appeal. It’s a lot more of an artistic challenge, structuring songs with odd-meter bits and complex drumming, lying underneath a complex soundscape of advanced melodic guitar riffage that ranges from playful to intrinsically powerful. It’s the kind of thing you’ll have to give repeat listens to fully appreciate everything that’s going on.

The self-produced CD was recorded all-digitally by the band “all over the Bay Area” - no word if that means a series of extensive home studios or picking up shifts at local booths, but it features pretty clean production and a tight sound overall. The cover art was done by Derek K Nielsen (www.daementia.com).

Fractal is very much worth checking out. Go to http://www.fractal-continuum.com to find out more; you can also pick up this CD at CDBaby.

Rating: 8.5

The first single from Queensryche’s Here in the Now Frontier album was the first song on the album, “Sign of the Times”, the somewhat political/societal rocker written by Chris DeGarmo. (This is not to be confused with the 2007 greatest hits compilation of the same name.) It’s not a bad song, and an okay choice for a single, so it appears in original studio album format on this four-song CD.

There’s also a new song as a b-side, somewhat rare for the band, who have only let a handful of cuts drop from their studio albums. This one’s called “Chasing Blue Sky,” and it’s a very moody and laid-back number, written by Geoff Tate and drummer Scott Rockenfield. It actually sounds much more like something Tate would later do on his self-titled solo album a few years later. I’m not a big fan of this track myself, partially because it’s so wallowy and uninteresting, and because it’s the first Queensryche song to have a harmonica solo in it, which is just plain stupid. But prior to all of the albums being re-released with bonus tracks (and, I guess, before Napster, Kazaa, and the like made it easy to just steal these kind of tracks without much effort), this was a somewhat elusive track to find, which means people were willing to pay twenty bucks for four songs.

The album’s also rounded out by two cuts from that 1992 MTV Unplugged show that was broadcast exactly once and then milked by record labels but never released in a proper fashion. Here you get “Silent Lucidity” (probably the big money shot for most part-time fans of the band) and “The Killing Words.” (I think you can now get all of the tracks for the unplugged show if you buy a certain number of the re-released albums, but I haven’t done the math to figure it out; there might be one or two tracks missing. The whole show, including false starts and second takes, is widely bootlegged.)

Trivia: the liner notes say “Queensryche is still:”, and then Chris Degarmo left about ten seconds later.

The whole idea of buying this is somewhat moot now. If you buy the new re-release of HitNF you get all three bonus tracks here, plus the unplugged version of “I Will Remember”. But back in my day, when eBay didn’t exist and you couldn’t file-share this stuff or buy the re-release, you had to buy this. It’s an okay grouping of tracks, but only for completists.

Rating: 8

The CD-single for the song “Hollow Years” came out to support the album Falling Into Infinity, and contains two versions of the song “Hollow Years”, the album version and a radio edit. That’s not what interests me about this CD, however, as I think that’s one of the weaker songs on the album, probably because it was made to be all “radio-friendly” and was probably likewise pushed by the record company. It had a video made that was never seen on TV and was a waste of approximately $100,000, but is hoarded by Dream Theater completists.

There are two things of interest on this CD. The first is a demo of the song “You Not Me.” It seems that during the demo stage, this song was called “You Or Me,” and the words were a bit different. That’s cool, in the sense that you get to see that even perfectionists like these guys change their minds (or have their minds changed by producers) and don’t just instantly shit out perfect songs. It’s also cool to hear what one of their songs sounds like at the demo stage. It’s not as low-quality as portastudio or jambox recording; it’s higher quality than most amateur bands who self-produce a CD. But it’s markedly different than the final product you get through the real recording.

The other interesting thing is a b-side called “The Way It Used To Be”. The track starts with a slower but upbeat verse before taking off a bit. There’s also what sounds like a theramin, or maybe it’s the creative use of a Leslie stack, for a weird wobbling sound. The song starts out great, but it’s too repetitive and drags on, with a total length of almost eight minutes.

Overall, this is a curious little single. I really do like the two new songs here, but you have to weigh in the cost of actually finding one of these things versus what you’ll get.

Rating: 8

Well, here’s a tough sell. How do you compile a greatest hits album for a band that only has one arguable “hit?” And furthermore, how do you sell a compilation album when a band’s core demographic are fanatic completists who most likely buy every single item ever issued by the band? There aren’t many casual Dream Theater fans, and it’s not like someone’s going to hear one of their songs on the local hot-100 radio station and rush out to buy this. So is it worth the $15 to buy this?

Well, maybe. This compilation includes two discs: a “dark side” of heavier metal numbers, and a “light side” of the more melodic songs. It’s an interesting way to group things, with the down side that I never realized Dream Theater recorded so damn many ballady songs until they were all presented back-to-back. At any rate, you get 22 tracks, which is a pretty decent value for $15. Plus you maintain continuity in owning every one of the band’s releases, which might calm the OCD demons in your head if you suffer from the “must have every release” syndrome.

And there are a few kinda-new things here. First, there’s “To Live Forever”, a B-Side from the “Lie” single. That wasn’t on any studio album; that’s also as far as you get with regard to original stuff. You also have a lot of remixes and radio edits and slightly different tracks. And three of the tracks from Images and Words are remastered. This is a big deal to some, because the original mix used a snare trigger throughout, and many a fanboy bitched and moaned about the production. Now, those three songs are mixed with a real snare. Unfortunately, after almost two decades of hearing the triggered snare, the regular one sounds weird to me. The remix does bring out some of the other percussion sound though, and the sax on “Another Day” sounds pretty crisp, too.

There’s not much else to say here. It’s a good grouping of songs, but it might not be an essential purchase to you, especially if you have other albums to catch up on. I don’t like greatest hits albums in general, but this isn’t bad.

Rating: 6