HOT SPACE

I'll give this one two stars for one reason and one reason alone - Under Pressure, the legendary collaboration with David Bowie which brings back some of Queen's formerly formidable art rock chops at the tail end of this forgettable album. The preceding tracks, however, are all one-star crud: Queen were attempting to make something funky and danceable, but the fact is that they were stunningly inept at it, the end results being Freddie singing over backing tracks which sound like botched impressions of the sort of stunning material Prince was making around this time. If you really want a progressively minded fusion of rock music, funk, soul and R&B, any classic Prince album will serve you much better than this pretender.