The opening track Procession does a lot of the talking in answer. It's an instrumental made of a kick drum and layers of guitars played in ways they normally are not. Brian May makes his guitars sound like brass instruments and organs. Mostly this is done through volume swells to remove the sharp sound of a pick on a string. Also, he puts the signal through heavy distortion which adds a lot of sustain. We're not meant to think it's actually a procession band, we're meant to marvel at the ingenuity. And here's the thing: it's way more than smart, the music in Procession is emotive. If we're in for prog rock on this LP it will be as we've never experienced it before. It's almost over before it begins but it ends with the figure that the next song will progress to.
A slight mist of guitar beeps from the end of the track leads us to Freddie Mercury's piano arpeggio which ends with a giant power chord. A galloping guitar opens to another aural vista and Mercury's pure vocals in high register begin the direct contact with the audience. "A word in your ear from father to son". This gives way to the verse that will repeat around excursions into celestial vocal harmonies and hard metal workouts and impassioned pleas. The band is throwing everything they have at the wall and creating something far more focussed and deliberate than anything on their debut. By the time Mercury sings in falsetto, "the air you breathe I live to give you" you'll be welling up. If this is metal it has never been so poignant, if it is prog it has never been this affecting. A choral chant and hard rock backing play to the fade. A high flute like guitar triad fades up.
And then that is joined by a series of weeping glissandi on the same tone introduce White Queen (As it Began). A deep acoustic strums chords under the vocal which is gentle but melancholy. After an opening lament the song begins with a glacial arpeggio played through a flanger. A courtier's account of waiting for the queen of the title progresses confessorially until a mass of glittering harmonies end the verse before a harder, impassioned restatement of the opening phrases thunders out. A sitar like solo later and the passion reignites with an outburst of new melodic material and more orchestral guitar before a final choral outburst and a gentle coda with only voice and acoustic guitar. If you know your Pre-Raphaelite painting this is what one might sound like.
Unlike the three previous tracks Some Day One Day has a clean beginning with sprightly acoustic chords and a vocal from Brian May who supports his pleasant but lower tier vocal with more guitar arrangements in a love song of polite longing. Faint praise? Well we've just had two of the bands most impressive recordings to that time in their career. The nice number is thoroughly enjoyable without ever wafting into filler territory.
Another clean start for the Roger Taylor song The Loser in the End whose crashing drums tighten to the opening line, "Mama's got a problem ..." in mighty metal voice. It's so powerful we don't have time to acknowledge that the guitars supporting it are almost entirely acousitc. There's plenty of brash stadium rock to follow and it feels almost a relief for the band just to rock out to one of Roger's barnstormers. Mind you, the lyric about sparing a thought for the mums left behind by their hedonistic kids is poignant despite the Zeppish strut.
While the first side was almost all Brian May's songs, the second is entirely given over to Freddie's flights and showstoppers. Ogre Battle begins with a partially backwards playing of the song's final moments before smashing into one of the most authentic speed metal guitar workouts before the eighties adopted the approach. If the choral harmonies of the previous side leaned toward the sublime these scream out like side characters from Dante's Inferno. Freddie leads us through a folkloric episode of breathless speed and imagery. It ends in partial reverse as it started and the wind effects are cut into by a persistent ticking which brings us to...
The Fairyfeller's Master Stroke which starts with a manic minor key chordal figure on a harpsichord before the big Queen choir and guitar orchestra kicks in. Then it's full steam medievalism of the kind in Richard Dadd's painting which gave the song its title. The song is not just a catalogue of the odd characters in the picture but a big, rich, bombastic celebration of their Tolkeinesque community. We end on a rushed harmonised final description as a trio of chords gives way to ...
Nevermore begins with a grand piano arpeggio that bears Freddie's mock melancholy song of love and loss with some big harmonies sounding operatically and trading speaker positions. Big and gorgeous if slight by comparison but you would never skip it.
A clean start for The March of the Black Queen on piano with some guitar stings before an explosion into harmony and the rest is not going behave. While the six minute opus changes every few seconds there is enough grounding repetition to keep the constant vocal and instrumental pyrotechnics on course rather than have it collapse under its own weight. If anything this is the parent of the more disciplined Bohemian Rhapsody and it is not hard to think that the later top 40 epic would have reached its clean lines and clipped humour without this near free for all earlier. Its final chord gives way to ...
The ringing acoustic guitars of Funny How Love Is with a throat lacerating high vocal by Freddie form the equivalent of Some Day One Day on the previous side (more on such soon). It's joyful and ringing with perfect voices and a constant shuffling rhythm, neither claiming higher purpose nor needing to.
The Seven Seas of Rhye bangs in with the same kind of energetic piano figure the Elton John would use the following year to make the Who's Pinball Wizard his own. A powerchord later and the galloping number rushes into the most conventional mid-seventies radio song on the record. The lyric is the same kind of play upon character types that went into most of the songs on this side so while it might be of its time it's not Tiger Feet or Come and be in My Gang unless you can imagine those redone by Noel Coward. And then it ends in a crash that is immediately swamped by a pub singalong version of I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside. It conventionality bringing the unconventionality of the rest of the record into sharp focus ... and with a smile. This was the band's first charting single.
The debut album had charted within the top 40 but not spectacularly. Queen II was begun very shortly after the delayed debut LP and, by the band's insistence, under easier conditions (extended studio rather than the borrowed minutes and offcuts of other bands like the first one). With loosened belts and a set of songs they were eager to experiment with, Queen managed to make a far more orderly and signature work instead of getting lazier with it. They gave their record company a long player like no other on the market and a top ten charter (number five, below such giants as Band on the Run and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road!). Queen had arrived and distinctly on their own terms. From Brian May's extra ordinary guitar orchestrations, vocal harmonies to floor their contemporaries and songs that ranged from sublime to infectiously insane, the band was set and in such a profound way that they got through the onslaught of punk with barely a scratch. This album and its success gave them that.
It would have been late 1976. The song Bohemian Rhapsody had wowed everyone of us over the Christmas holidays and drove us to buy our own copies of the album without bothering with the cassette undermarket. It was straight to the LP with the cover art, lyrics and winking comments about Bechstein debauchery and nobody playing synthesisers. Owning the artefact by this band that had shown up underneath the elder sibling canon and who were ours to cherish, was to feel like starting on the ground floor of Coca Cola or space travel.
But it wasn't quite the ground floor, it was the band's fourth album. Over the months from the beginning of 1976 to its end and beyond, I looked for, found and bought all of the earlier ones, in order of discovery. Queen, the debut, was all British rock goodness, if uneven and occasionally messy. Sheer Heart Attack was accomplished and presented the formula for future Queen albums. But Queen II was different. When I bought the U.K. copy from Ken Hurford's Import Records around the corner, I had to wait to hear it as we were in between styli at the big four speaker (but not quadrophonic) hifi Dad had built. That was maybe at the end of the day when he got back from work. Until then I took it over to Nanna's to pore over while digging into pikelets with cream and cumquat marmalade and tea with lemon served in glass. Alright, alright, I just thought you might like the detail.
So, there was the cover. Black on the outside with the band members heads in chiaroscuro lighting just like the opening of the Bohemian Rhapsody video. The title, an art nouveau font in white in a corner, carried over in style to the rear cover which listed the tracks over a more elaborate coat of arms featuring a swan, fairies, lions and other heraldic inventions which looked medieval as imagined by the late nineteenth century. Also, the sides weren't simply one and two but Side White and Side Black. Opening the gatefold showed the band posed in the same kind of rough diamond arrangement but entirely in white (and the drummer and bass player in reverse places which would have them the same as the front cover if you could see through it). The other half of the gatefold was a repeat of the back only, black on white with various production notes and the statement: "And nobody played the synthesiser ... again."
Dad got home with the stylus and I put the disc on, poring over the lyrics and marvelling at the sounds. As a kid whose first fandom was classical and previous, the record spoke to me directly, it's virtuosity and imagination was like reading the best of kids books from when I was much younger. Like those, it gave me pictures and daydreams.
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