There are a few different reasons a group would record an album of cover tunes. Bands just out of the gate might not have enough original material written, and need to fall back on the classics to come up with a CD’s worth of tunes. Other bands feel a need to “pay tribute” and record their own interpretations of their influences’ hit tunes. Some might want to do something weird. And others are looking for a quick way to make a buck, or, even better, get out of an album’s worth of obligation to a record deal. (See also the main reason live albums are recorded.) So which of these reasons best describe why Queensryche went into the studio and laid down eleven cover tunes for this album? Good question.

Queensryche, like many prog-rock bands, have a very narrowly-defined scope to work with, as far as their reach to do different-sounding things. Yes, they’ve progressed quite a bit over the years. But when they record almost any genre of song, it’s going to sound pretty much like a Queensryche song. And that’s the biggest failure of this album. The band set out to record a wide swath of different types of music for this collection, and only a few things worked well.

Credit where it’s due: this CD starts with a dead-on version of Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine.” Queensryche can do a pretty decent version of ‘Floyd, at least the post-Syd version. (In fact, the first time I ever heard “Silent Lucidity,” my initial response was “Jesus Christ, Roger Waters is going to sue them for copyright infringement, this sounds so much like one of his songs.”) They throw down a thick, synth-laden rendition, with some ethereal saxophone bits, super-sustained guitar licks, and somber lyrics, and it works well. Add to this the fact that the album doesn’t sound like it was recorded on a Radio Shack laptop ala Mindcrime 2, and it’s a pretty impressive number.

Another song that works is the band’s rendition of ‘Sabbath’s “Neon Knights.” When you figure that Queensryche started playing covers of old metal tunes, a rehash of a Dio-era classic doesn’t seem that far-fetched. (Add to that the fact that the band used to open for Dio back in their beginning days, and Ronnie James appeared on the aforementioned jambox-recorded Mindcrime 2, and it isn’t too peculiar to hear the band paying tribute to the Satanic dwarf.) The guitar is pretty spot-on, and although Tate tries a little too hard with his singing, it’s a decent recording.

The real problem with many of these tunes is that Tate’s operatic style is too distinct and inflexible. It’s like when William Shatner recorded all of those Beatles classics like “Lucy in the Sky”: no matter what he did, it sounded like a stick-up-the-ass Captain Kirk, and not a decent rendition of a Beatles tune. When I hear Geoff Tate try to belt out “Synchronicity II” or “Bullet the Blue Sky,” it’s so forced and inorganic, it makes Geddy Lee’s experiment with rapping sound smooth as silk.

Some of the song selections are absolutely baffling. They cover The Ojays’ “For the Love of Money,” which is basically an attempt at saying “hey, we’re 100% whitebread, but we want you to think we’re hip by covering an R&B number in the whitest possible way, with shrieking heavy metal guitar licks and an opera singer frontman piling on the tremolo! And our drum roadie’s brother once went to high school with a dude that was friends with a black guy, too! We’re multicultural!”

And a few of the songs are absolutely terrible. They do a completely unlistenable version of Queen’s “Innuendo,” a stumbling take of CSN&Y’s “Almost Cut My Hair,” and an awkward and uptight recording of “For What it’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield. Overall, there are maybe three or four tracks that did not get an instant “never, ever play again” rating, and the rest are relatively forgettable. Like I said, the production is decent, though. Maybe they can write some new material and record it this well to get a decent album. Until then, I’d skip this one.

Rating: 4

Okay, before I start, I remembered this tiny bit of trivia, and it took me forever on google to confirm it, so I better just paste it in. This album, in the original LP form, had a bunch of city names under the names of each track. Turns out that the album was written on the road, and those are the names of the cities where that specific song was hashed out. I only find this interesting because a couple of these were written just down the road from where I grew up, in South Bend, Indiana. Here’s the full list, since this has been long-since deleted on CD reissues, as far as I know:

“Bastille Day” - Beamsville, Pittsburgh, Louisville “I Think I’m Going Bold” - Saginaw, Fort Wayne, Lansing “Lakeside Park” - South Bend, Saginaw, Terre Haute, Cincinnati “The Necromancer” - Los Angeles, Toronto “The Fountain Of Lamneth” “In The Valley” - Beamsville, Atlanta “Didacts & Narpets” - Beamsville, Toronto “No-one At The Bridge” - Beamsville, Dallas, South Bend “Panacea” - Beamsville, Corpus Christi, Atlanta “Bacchus Plateau” - Atlanta, Beamsville, Northampton Penn “The Fountain” - Beamsville, Chicago, Dallas, Lansing, Detroit, Louisville

On to the review. This is a really lopsided album, I hate to say. It’s as if the band simultaneously realized they could write long-length prog rock epics, but needed to write short little AOR ditties to get on the radio. How did they reconcile this? By writing three little songs and two really big ones. They did some good stuff in here, but as an album, it’s not balanced. And the record company thought the same thing, especially since this album did not outsell its predecessor.

Both of the long tracks (“The Necromancer” and “The Fountain of Lamneth”) remind me entirely of playing D&D in my mom’s basement. Actually, they remind me a little more of the days before my driver’s license or the invention of the opposite sex, when I used to build model airplanes (when they still had the good glue) and listen to Rush tapes on repeat, over and over. Both of the long tracks are excellent and overly geeky, with lots of weird drumming and some strange vocal effects and stories of mystical times and places. “Necromancer” is totally about Lord of the Rings, while “Lamneth” is a more philosophical take on addiction and life. The former even includes a short tie-in to the last album, aka the song “By Tor and the Snow-Dog,” also a long-format tune that I guess needed just a little more.

It’s great to listen to this stuff for the pure nerdiness of it, and to also see a precursor of what would later lead to 2112, among other things. My favorite little bit is “Didacts and Narpets,” which is nothing more than a really quick drum part from Neil Peart, with Geddy shouting a bunch of weird, unintelligible stuff over it. (Yes, I know there are exact lyrics and even a meaning for the title, but I’m too lazy to google for it, and I’m to afraid that if I paraphrase, I’ll get a million Rush fanatics correcting me. The truth is out there.)

Of the other three songs, “Bastille Day” is strong, and gives us a little history lesson wrapped in a Zep-like rock number. It’s solid, but never landed with me for some reason. “I Think I’m Going Bald” is absolutely silly, and evidence that the band ran out of material in the studio. (It was actually written for Canadian band Max Webster.) “Lakeside Park” (written in South Bend!) is a mellower tune, talking about hanging out on Victoria Day at St. Catharine’s, on Lake Ontario. It’s a very sweet little song talking about hanging out with friends on the holiday, and I’ve always liked it. It got the band a fair bit of airplay, especially in their native Canada (although Geddy Lee, in a 1993 interview, says the song now makes him cringe.)

Overall, this isn’t a bad album, although back in the days of cassette tape, I had to do some careful fast-forwarding for each listen, to avoid the bits I didn’t like. It’s dated, and it’s not perfect, but it’s a good effort, considering all of these songs were written in hotel rooms after the band put in a full night gigging on the road. I wish I could like this more, but it’s not exactly like the kind of thing I’d leave in my car and listen to every other day. It’s probably my favorite of the pre-2112 albums, but that’s when things suddenly took off in full-prog-ahead mode, so this is more of an overlooked era for many.

Rating: 7

I must have been 12 at the time, going on 13, when the video for “Jump” came out. I didn’t listen to much “heavy” music, but I spent at least ten hours a week glued to this new thing called MTV, and I thought that Van Halen was in the same league as Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Madness, Cyndi Lauper, and all of the other stuff in constant circulation on the new-fangled music video channel. But I secretly longed for heavier music, and I’d seen the live video for the band’s earlier song, “Unchained,” so I knew there was something more than just Eddie playing keyboards. I have to admit that I bought the single for “Jump” on 45 because I saw the video and fell for it. I picked up the single, which came out right before the album’s January 1 release date, and had to hide it from my friend Jim’s mom, because it depicted an angel smoking on the cover, and she was a Jesus freak that regularly searched his room like a warden at a prison, confiscating his Dungeons and Dragons gear and burning whatever music the 700 Club told her to ash-can.

The one thing that everyone will tell you about this album is that it introduced the synthesizer to metal. Maybe that’s true, maybe not (VH had used synth on a few other songs previously), but I can tell you that until about 1990, a lot of metal bands despised the synth, so maybe in some sense, the neutered Eddie Van Halen tapping away on his keys set back metal a few years, because a lot of long-hairs didn’t want to become him. Add to that the fact that before 1984, Eddie was a guitar genius, and his tapping style of fretwork was absolutely awe-inspiring. But by this album, every 15-year-old kid in a guitar store was playing “Eruption” with all ten fingers on the rosewood, so maybe it made sense for EVH to branch out and try some other instrument. It was probably wise for Eddie to bow out of the guitar god pissing contest that ensued, with every Steve Vai/Yngwie Malmsteen type slapping the strings as fast as possible to the point of ridiculousness. He probably made a hell of a lot more money with a lot less stress when he was laying more mindless riffs with Sammy Hagar and shilling Pepsi, anyway.

ANYWAY, this album starts out with the title track, which oddly enough is just a minute and seven seconds of weird synth intro that sounded like it should be on an ELP record. (This, years later, pissed me off when I was in a Pizza hut with a couple of friends and I fed a bunch of change into the jukebox and picked “1984,” not remembering this, and then getting nothing but a minute of swooshy synth for my quarter and not some hard rocking song instead.) This goes right into “Jump,” which I don’t need to review, as every human being alive from the years 1984 to present has heard this song at least 22 million times. It was a really cool song for about a month, then I forgot about it, and then a year later when WGN and the Cubs decided to use this as the theme music for their games, I decided that maybe I needed to burn my single of the tune. This song got so much god damned airplay that my eighty-something grandparents could hum along. There were African tribes in the middle of nowhere who had never seen water before who could sing you this song. And yes, it had a cute little video which was nothing more than the band lip-syncing, with slo-mo shots of David Lee Roth jumping around in the air. Usually the band-singing-along videos are stupid, but this one was actually metaphorical. Well, I guess that REM song “Stand” is too, because they were standing up.

1984 was a harvesting ground for a lot of quick-growth hits, thanks again to that MTV thing. “Panama” was a hard-rocking song that either talked about David Lee Roth driving a sports car, or maybe getting a hand job in a sports car. Previous songs like the aforementioned “Unchained” usually had 80% cool parts that rocked and then 20% awkward or experimental bridges that didn’t really fit. But “Panama” pushed the envelope on its chorus, and then got into a slower, sexier part with Roth pretty much just talking, and it worked much better to create a continuous song that worked good on the radio and TV. Another big hit was “Hot for Teacher,” which was remembered as the song with the big concept video about a nerdy kid and some totally hot teachers, dancing on desks with bikinis. David Lee Roth should have traded in his leather pants for a director’s chair after metal got old for him, because his influence all over this video shows that he can market the idea of a band (and Van Halen is a big “idea” band, with that idea being partying) and totally make it come to life on the screen. Oddly enough, nobody remembers this song musically (it’s largely instead mentioned as a punchline when yet another middle-aged teacher starts banging a teenaged student, which seems to happen with an oddly increasing frequency these days, probably because I am no longer a teenager), because it’s one of the best cuts on the album. First of all, Eddie Van Halen, who I just mentioned wussing out on the synth from this point on, totally lights this track up on the six-string, practically playing straight solos through his entire part. And his brother Alex makes this probably the best double-bass drum track ever.

The rest of the album is still good, but a bit odd. There’s a track “Top Jimmy” that’s an old VH-style number, which is very good, but everybody forgets was on here. Same for “Drop Dead Legs,” except it wasn’t as great. “I’ll Wait” became an AOR hit for the band, and “Girl Gone Bad” was okay. “House of Pain” seemed to be a last-minute addition; it’s a really old track of the band’s that was recorded and thrown on, and doesn’t match any of the rest of the album. It’s not bad, but… weird.

As far as sound, production, all of that junk, there’s not much to talk about here, since all of the Van Halen albums have pretty stellar and clean production. Ted Templeman kept the band tight with good drums and clean guitar that had enough space that you’d swear there was a second guy on the axe backing up Eddie. I’m sure a true fan could argue as to which VH albums sounded better or worse, but for the most part, they had a commodity production to them, and maybe 1984 was a half-notch above that.

The weirdest part of this album is that with all of the stuff going on with those nine tracks, the whole thing weighs in at 33:08. I’m not expecting them to give up their three- and four-minute tracks and go all Rick Wakeman on my ass with a 17-minute prog rock-out, but the album is over before it starts. There’s also the issue that this will always be considered the “last” “real” Van Halen record. [Not true anymore, because they did an album with the classic lineup minus Michael Anthony in 2012.] Given that the band was at the peak of popularity in 1985 when Roth split/was fired, the record company would have rolled out some live album or greatest hits stopgap, rather than to rush in the studio. Either way, this album is an odd bookend for the first part of the band’s career.

Rating: 8

Every band has to start somewhere. What’s amazing about Rush, after listening to their self-titled first release, is that it’s so far removed from their later core releases, and they went through such a giant transformation by their second album. If you take their second or third album and remove the monster-solo prog-rock geekfests and the Tolkein-meets-Ayn Rand lyrics, you still aren’t anywhere near this one. It’s a miracle this obscure band, scraping by on a self-released album, even got the chance at a second one.

The easiest way to sonically describe this is Led Zeppelin clone with a chick singer. The band blows through eight numbers that are straight-up, simple, forgettable AOR rock. And I guess that’s forgivable. I mean, listen to some of AC/DC’s early stuff and it sure isn’t Back in Black. It’s barely metal as we know it today. Same with KISS, same with a lot of other bands that started before things really got categorized and defined. So here are some tracks of simple bar-band blues, and that’s fine. And Neil Peart wasn’t in the band yet, so you’re trading the all-time best drum wizard for regular old guy John Rutsey clonking away the basic beats. (Rutsey quit the band after their first release, saying that they weren’t going anywhere, and also citing his diabetes as being a problem with extended touring. He, oddly enough, got into amateur bodybuilding after he dropped out of music.)

Probably the biggest problem on this album is the big love-it-or-hate-it of Rush, being Geddy Lee’s vocals. Some people are immediately turned off by his high-register singing, which sounds slightly feminine or falsetto. I personally don’t mind his singing a lot of the time, but there are usually a couple of runs or notes per album that grate at me a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff on this first album falls under that category. Maybe it’s because there’s a lot more “oooh yeeah” phrasing in the hard rock style, and by the time they started singing more sedate stuff about Dungeons and Dragons and not “baby-baby” bar music, he stopped doing that.

There are a couple of gems in this album. One is the song “Working Man,” which became a live staple for a while, and rocks out well. It also, like many of the songs here, shows that Alex Lifeson is a damn good guitarist, and can really jam away like he just got done listening to a bunch of Hendrix and wants to do similar work. This song is the reason a DJ in Ohio started spinning the record, playing the song on Friday afternoons to their working-class fans. (This later resulted in the band’s deal with Mercury records, and the wider rerelease of this album.) “Finding My Way” is a good opener, and “In the Mood” is funny, but maybe a bit corny. The other stuff is so un-Rush-like it’s only interesting as a historical note. Probably the most interesting thing about this material is that it deals with straight-up, hey-baby sex stuff, which became taboo as the band went on to talk about inevitable nuclear war and starships vanishing into black holes.

The album itself has some interesting history, in that it was pieced together from two different studios. The band’s first release, a cover of the song “Not Fade Away,” was recorded with an original B-side. This work was done at Toronto’s Eastern Studios (where Gordon Lightfoot was putting down most of his mid-seventies albums, too) in a series of graveyard shifts, and included two other original songs, plus the versions of “In the Mood” and “Take a Friend” that ended up on the LP. The band also laid down some more skeletal work on other songs on the studio’s 8-track before becoming dissatisfied and moving to Toronto Sound Studios and self-producing the rest of the album. No record company would touch the album or the “Not Fade Away” single, so the band and manager Ray Daniels formed Moon Records to release both. When the album got picked up by Mercury, long-time Rush producer Terry Brown re-mixed the album into the form most of us have heard.

(Also worth noting: in 2008, the band found an old tape with a different version of “Working Man”, including an alternate solo. This was released directly to the Rock Band video game, and then later released on iTunes. It’s worth the 99 cents to hear this slightly different version if you’re a Rush fanatic.)

All I can really say about this album is that it got a lot better really fast. Completists will obviously want check this out, but it’s a tough sell for the casual fan of the later music. If you’re only familiar with “Tom Sawyer” and newer, a better dip into the old catalog would be starting with Fly By Night, and catching the couple of good tunes here on the first live album with Neil on the drums.

Rating: 6.5

[I feel I need to put some kind of disclaimer on this for giving a Rush album a 6.5 and I’m sure I’m going to hear about it. So, sorry or whatever.]

Every band has to start somewhere. For prog-rockers Queensryche, they begin with a very NWOBHM-styled four-song EP. And it wasn’t even the same band initially - they were known as The Mob then, and Geoff Tate was enlisted to sign on the project, prior to him taking the full-time role as a frontman. The band recorded this release primarily as a demo, in a series of graveyard shift recording sessions at a local studio. They shopped it around with no avail, but when Kim and Diana Harris, owners of a Seattle record store, got a listen, they formed 206 records (206 being Seattle’s area code), managed the group, changed the band’s name, and released the demo as an EP in 1983. It got a huge following in Europe (thanks to Kerrang! magazine), and by the end of the year, the band signed on with EMI records and became a national act.

For as much as these four tracks don’t sound like Queensryche, they still do. The opener, “Queen of the Reich,” starts with Geoff Tate holding this impossibly long note in operatic style, and then launches into something similar to older Iron Maiden. The songs “Nightrider” and “Blinded” are structurally a bit more strange, and not straightforward rockers. The album finishes up with “The Lady Wore Black,” a slower tune that still rocks and shows the kind of direction the band wanted to go, with more progressive leanings and longer songs.

This is obviously a demo recorded by an unsigned band on a budget, and not an established act who is trying to explore their musicianship. It’s all very simple stuff here, without the extended set pieces, massive overdubs, or complicated introductions that the band would find later. The band clearly came from a NWOBHM background, with more influences in the metal area than any art-rock leanings. Even their photo resembles a band that probably plays Scorpions covers out of small bars in Federal Way, instead of the great prog-rock band that they later became.

For the longest time, if you bought this CD, it would come with “The Prophecy” as a bonus track, which is an excellent outtake from the Rage For Order sessions. With the later remaster, this EP now includes another seven live tracks, rescued from an old Warning-era live-in-Japan laserdisc that is no longer available. I’m an old fart with the older 5-song version (I actually had the tape, which repeated the same five songs on both sides), and I’ve always thought of the album as a good starting point for the band. I’m not sure what I’d think of the same release as a catch-all for a bunch of other stuff. It’s nice that they’ve added more bonus material, but for whatever reason, I like thinking of this as the same, little, 20-minute tape I got when I was first getting into the band.

Rating: 8