Queen - Works
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CD Details
Artist: QueenEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1991-11-26
Music Label: Hollywood Records
Soundtracks:
- Radio Ga Ga
- Tear It Up
- Its A Hard Life
- Man On The Prowl
- Machines (Or Back To Humans)
- I Want To Break Free
- Keep Passing The Open Windows
- Hammer To Fall
- Is This The World We Created....?
- I Go Crazy
- Radio Ga Ga
- I Want To Break Free
Music reviews of Works
Music Review: Mixed
Rating: 3 Stars
Following the commercial, critical and artistic fiasco of Hot Space, Queen tried to get their act back together for The Works, and in a way they did. The Works is Queen revamped, with a new persona and a new sound; and this time, not a pale copy of current popular music like Hot Space often sounds, but a fresh, modernized version of their own style. In The Works Queen embrace the 80's, synth-pop and new-wave but also keep a loyalty to their roots, using synthesizers more moderately and tastefully and giving Brian May a chance to shine again. Commercially, The Works was also a comeback, scoring them one of their best selling records as well as three major hit singles and one minor hit (Hot Space only had one major single, and even that with the help of the great David Bowie), and basing them as a supergroup worldwide. Using MTV and the relatively new media of the music video to their full extent, Queen were bigger than ever before and were known in countries that hardly heard of them before (my own native Israel included).
And yet musically, the album is only the beginning of the climb back. The album doesn't hold as a whole like those made in the 70s did; in fact, the tracks surrounding said major hits sound a lot like filler material, thrown in to fill some time. The hit songs - I Want to Break Free, Radio Ga Ga and Hammer to Fall indeed stand with Queen's best, most memorable tracks; I Want to Break Free is a John Deacon penned song of independence (echoes of his own Spread Your Wings from 1977 creeping in), that is accompanied by one of Queen's most memorable and provocative videos, and probably their finest use of a synthesizer. Hammer to Fall is a dark, classic Brian May rocker, with power chords reminiscent of vintage tracks like Tie Your Mother Down or Fat Bottomed Girls, a paranoid and bitter anthem of the Cold War and of WWIII. And Radio Ga Ga is drummerman's Roger Taylor's first major hit, a gorgeous and devilishly catchy homage to the radio of his youth, his creative breakthrough that would pave the way to other hits like A Kind of Magic and These Are the Days of Our Lives, and also accompanied by an unforgettable video, combining the band members in footage from the silent classic Metropolis.
But Freddie Mercury, once the greatest creative element of the band, just doesn't seem to try, and his tracks all sound chewed up and stale. It's a Hard Life, the weakest of the four singles spawned by the album, is nothing more than a cheesy ballad that tries to recapture the magic of Love of My Life and Somebody To Love. Man on the Prowl is a shameless replay of Crazy Little Thing Called Love, with none of the energy and none of the soul that this instant classic had. Keep Passing the Open Windows is simply put one of the most uninspired tracks ever laid down by this once great band. Salvation isn't found, either, in Brian and Roger's tuneless, pointless, all too heavily synthesized Machines (Back to Humans) or by Brian's Tear It Up, which may sound like so many of his better songs but has nothing to offer by its own right; it may be fun for a listen or two at full volume, but is ultimately unnecessary. At least the album ends on a strong note with Is This The World We Created, which is credited to both Brian and Freddie, but sounds more like Freddie's writing than anything he's done alone on this album; lyrically it's a pretty obvious lamentation of how awful our world is, but the lyrics are effective and the music is beautiful, and more intimate and minimal than any other song here.
The Works is the kind of album that teaches you how to use the skip button on your CD player. Ultimately, the painful point is that any song here that is worth hearing can also be found on Greatest Hits 2 (except for Is This The World... a great recording of which can be found on Live At Wembley '86, and if you really like brainless rockers Tear It Up, which can be found on Queen Rocks), and in that aspect, it's actually less worth buying than Hot Space, which contains some more unknown songs. Of course the Queen completist will need The Works as well, but anybody else is well advised to drop Queen immediately after The Game and then pick it up again with A Kind of Magic.
Description of Works
Japanese exclusive 2001 remaster of 1984 album. 9 tracks.Classic Rock CDs
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