162. liar

Liar‘s the first Queen song I ever heard. Grade Nine, a tinny little radio in my bedroom, I was probably doing homework. And suddenly there it was, knocking me spiraling out of orbit (in a damned good way) like something from Jesus Christ Superstar, except without any Jesus involved, thank God. Just the trials of tribulations of some guy who’d done too much lying and now there was hell to pay. But it was the band that had me floored – all the power and stomp of Black Sabbath mixed with the epic sweep of somebody like Yes, and a singer (or was there a whole choir?) who didn’t seem to know any limits at all. Of course, I had to tell everybody about it at school the next day, but most of them just laughed. A band called Queen? What were they? Fags? Jump ahead a couple of years and I’d be thoroughly vindicated. Queen would be mega by then, with even the football jocks trying to hit Bohemian Rhapsody’s high notes. Except I didn’t really care about Queen anymore by then, they’d peaked already with their first three albums. Or maybe they never really got past Liar, that part toward the end where the riff lands heavier than metal and then the bass goes rampaging off into a whole new dimension (take a bow, John Deacon, you never get enough credit) and then one more chorus of ‘liars’. It still gives me chills. Sometimes anyway.” (Philip Random)

Queen-firstALBUM-edit

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305-304. ogre battle + the fairy feller’s master stroke

“I definitely prefer Queen‘s earlier more obscure stuff. Bohemian Rhapsody for instance is just not as rocking, as imaginative, as deliriously wigged out, as good, as the two tracks (joined as one) that that kick off side two (Side Black) of their second album (the imaginatively titled Queen II). Ogre Battle hits first, rocking like something out of a thrash metal wet dream, and featuring actual ogres battling in and around a two-way mirror mountain, with smoke and explosions. And then comes The Faerie Feller’s Master Stroke, better than the opera part of Boho-Rap because it’s not just some multi-tracked excuse for the band to show off their vocal talents, it’s actually about something, it’s about a painting from the 19th Century that Freddy Mercury could not get enough of, by a guy named Richard Dadd — ten years in the making, and all of them spent by Mr. Dadd in an insane asylum where he was serving a life sentence for murdering his dad. It’s true.” (Philip Random)

Queen-1974