THE GAME

I will not spend time reviewing all preceeding albums to this one (up to Jazz and the Live Killers) , because they are all good and would rather avoid the prog or not debate) but the good Queen era stopped at the above-stated albums. From this one comes the "certainly not prog" era, whether this is to be linked with Freddy Mercury's coming out is open to debate but also due to the MTV phenomena (Body Language videos etc...)...... Whatever..... But Queen did alienate most of their older fans around this album and Hot works. And I was one of them.And i am still. And hearing tunes like Bite The Dust Crazy Little Thing and Radio Gaga, will probably never reconcile me totally with Queen.

Outside of the odd tune on here that will remind you of previous albums , Queen entered the 80's with the typical sickly drumming (and it is a shame because Taylor is a good drummer) of that decade. This alone is 2* stars taken away. For the rest , one cannot say that Queen was headed for the commercialism since they were always commercial, but at least before they were challenging: now from this album on , they will be controversial.

I may be tough on this album , since they will do much worse with the next three (Space , Gordon and Works) , only really bettering at the end of the decade with Innuendo, but I want to make a statement here, that this is the Cornerstone album (that Styx did also but called it as such) and it clearly sets the mark between the good (before) , the bad (after) and the Ugly - Montserrat Caballe ;-)