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Review: Queensryche, Marble Factory
Let’s rock like it’s 1987! Death Angel‘s Mark Osegueda is exceptionally delighted to be playing in an old warehouse behind Temple Meads. He just can’t stop telling us how great and beautiful we all are, like a thrash metal lothario bent on total audience seduction, in between reminiscing about headlining the Bierkeller back in the day. Osegueda and guitarist Rob Cavestany are the only surviving members from that line-up of the San Francisco Bay Area-based Filipino thrashers. But in many ways the band has fared better than tonight’s headliners, turning out a consistent body of work with a few welcome experimental detours and acoustic flourishes, and recently scoring their biggest – and, frankly, only – US chart hit with The Dream Calls for Blood. In keeping with that album’s back-to-basics tone and the constraints of a support slot, they deliver a brisk, finely calibrated set of precision thrash metal, concluding with saucy crowd favourite Mistress of Pain from their debut The Ultra-Violence. Given that these guys were about 14 years old when it was written, one assumes the lyrics owe more to fevered imagination than experience.
Queensryche have dubbed this the Return to History Tour, which is a euphemism for another greatest hits show with virtually nothing post-1990. That’s probably wise given that they’ve been releasing mediocre albums to ever-diminishing returns over the last couple of decades and also found time to engage in an unedifying court battle with former singer Geoff Tate. Recent recruit Todd La Torre proves more than a match for Tate in his prime, his ear-splitting falsetto doubtless prompting quite a commotion at the Bristol Dogs Home down the road. It’s a pretty short set with no encore, but long-term fans are rewarded with deeper mining of Queensryche’s earlier recordings than we usually get, right back to the none-more-Judas Priest debut EP Queen of the Reich and the oft-overlooked, under-appreciated Rage for Order album. As usual, it’s the material from their pioneering political prog-metal concept piece Operation: Mindcrime that gets the biggest response, the likes of The Needle Lies, Eyes of a Stranger and Breaking the Silence all being performed flawlessly. There’s just the one new song, Arrow of Time, which sounds decent enough on a first listen. Trouble is that Queensryche have fallen so far that simply being pretty damn impressive won’t be sufficient to recover their former, justly exalted status.
is needed now More than ever
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