Queen’s 1973 Debut Gets a Glorious Sonic Upgrade That Transforms It From Black-and-White to Living Color: Album Review
variety.comJem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Queen’s 1973 debut album has always been an outlier in the group’s catalog. Yes, it’s a vivid opening statement that set the stage for the glorious creativity and bombast — the heavenly voices, snarling guitars and baroque flourishes — that would peak with “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “A Night at the Opera” just over two years later.
But the album suffered from a muddy mix that made it feel stiff and unfocused, a situation probably not helped by the fact that most of it was recorded on borrowed equipment in the middle of the night, when the studio owned by the unsigned band’s managers was available for free.
Queen were a complex and ambitious band, so it’s not surprising that the relatively inexperienced outfit’s debut album would be imperfect.
But at times that complexity and ambition came out jumbled, and some of Freddie Mercury’s lyrics were so loaded with Biblical imagery that the group could have been mistaken for an early Christian rock outfit.
Read more on variety.com