CD Odyssey Disc 739: Queen

Weirdly, I have once again rolled a Queen album and after this review I’ll be down to one. Although this happens once in a while, it always feels a bit weird.

Disc 739 is….The Works

Artist: Queen

Year of Release: 1984

What’s up with the Cover?  We go from the saturated colour of “Hot Space” to a sparse black and white photo shoot where the band was apparently told not to dress in anything nice.

Freddie is rocking his muscle shirt, as usual. No those aren’t tattoos on his forearms, that’s hair. John Deacon looks like he’s embraced the eighties a bit too wholeheartedly and Brian May looks like he’s not embraced them enough. As for Roger Taylor, I believe he is wearing ballet shoes. You don’t get to try to look tough in ballet shoes, Roger, so wipe that glare off your face.

How I Came To Know It: Again this was me just drilling through all of Queen’s albums, and again this was my friend Spence’s recommendation (Spence likes his Queen and “the Works” has a special place in his heart).

How It Stacks Up:  Like yesterday, I still have fifteen Queen albums. They are all great in their own way so there is no shame when I say that “The Works” only managed to land at #11, behind “The Miracle” and ahead of “A Kind of Magic.” Really it is tied for 10^th with “The Miracle.” I don’t want to create a scandal out of it, but if you want it all, you’ve got to take a stand and so I’m saying “The Works” is #11, much as it pains me.

Ratings: 4 stars

After “Hot Space” Queen was ready to get back to rock n’ roll, and that’s what they did with “The Works.”

Gone are the dance music and funk grooves and in their place is a mix of rocking guitar riffs, show-tune piano, and anthemic rock. It is a return to Queen’s more traditional sound, but tinged with a lot of the musical innovations they tried on for size on both “The Game” and “Hot Space.”

The result is a sound different from their early career but still intrinsically Queen. In many ways this new imagining of their own style was fully formed on the “The Works” and would serve as the standard right through to their last record in 1995.

Let’s just say I like it. This album – both lyrically and musically – is a conscious struggle between the coming age of technology-inspired music and a plea that we not lose what it is to be human in the process.

The journey begins with the radio hit, “Radio Gaga” which is at once a put-down of what radio might become, but also a nostalgic journey back to what made radio great and how those times could come again. The conflict this song expresses about radio is about midway between the enthusiastic support of Rush’s “Spirit of Radio” and Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio.” Radio never did make that comeback, but I like that Queen was still holding out hope in 1984 that it would.

Other songs bemoaning the state of the modern world include “Machines (Back to Human)” which is a cool track, although the robot voices and references to bytes and megachips haven’t aged well over the years.

“Hammer to Fall” and “Is This The World We Created?” are both songs that bring me back to the hopelessness of how we all felt at the height of the Cold War. “Hammer to Fall” is a powerful anthem of rock, undercut by its own theme of us all just waiting for the world to end in a mushroom cloud. “Is This the World…” reminded us that even without a bomb going off, we were going to have to face up to the poverty and misery that was happening every day without a shot being fired.

For my money, the album is best when it brings all these themes together, as the band does on “It’s a Hard Life.” “It’s a Hard Life” reminds us that there are a lot of obstacles we’ll face, but we’ll make it through if we just love one another. This song shows Queen’s most underrated quality; their ability to inspire and to show us the warmth and glory of the human spirit. It isn’t just done with words either, as this song combines a soaring guitar solo from Brian May with Freddie’s inspiring singing to make us feel like we are all going to make it somehow, worlds of sorrow be damned.

“The Works” isn’t my favourite Queen album but it is telling that this far down the list, I’m still giving it 4 stars. That’s how good they are. And so despite David Letterman’s imminent retirement, if you were to demand my Top Ten list of Queen albums, I would have to refuse. For Queen, the list goes to 11.

Best tracks: Radio Gaga, It’s a Hard Life, I Want to Break Free, Hammer to Fall,