SHEER HEART ATTACK

After some moderate success with Queen II, which was released in February 1974, barely 6 months had passed and the powers that be were demanding a follow up album, so in July of the same year, the band was writing new music for another album to be released by the end of the same year. There was a major problem, however, and that was the band was unable to even finish their previous tour because Brian May had been hospitalized after contracting hepatitis from a vaccination required for traveling to Austrailia, and then to make matters worse, he was re-hospitalized for a stomach ulcer. The band, after all of this, had to write the new album. The parts had to be recorded leaving out May's guitar and vocal parts.

When "Sheer Heart Attack" was finally finished, the result turned out to have more variety and less heaviness from its predecessors. It ended up signaling a movement of the band away from the progressively heavy sound to a more accessible, yet varied sound with songs ranging from hard, stadium rock to vaudeville style music. This formula would work well with the band and would end up giving the band its famous and sometimes unpredictable sound. However, whatever style the band tried would end up being top-notch music, never sounding very contrived most of the time, and also lending to the glam rock persona that Mercury and the band adopted. It's this glam rock style that helped the band retain its progressive status even with most of the music being more accessible.

The album surprised a lot of fans, yet most of them remained faithful and were eager to follow the band with this new sound. However, the album, being the first example of this new sound, can seem a bit choppy and uneven to most people. Personally, it is one of my favorites since I love the courage of the band to do this, and it is obvious they are trying to make this new formula work. The album appropriately begins with "Brighton Rock", a track that was actually written long before even the first Queen albums. It was originally intended for the Queen II album, but was left off because the band felt it didn't fit with the rest of that album. It starts off the album with a rousing and killer guitar solo after some vocals from Mercury. The guitar solo here is multi-tracked to give it that multi-guitar sound that May would become famous for and is considered one of the best solos ever. Honestly, it does sit up there with the best with May being the sole player through most of it. May was back from his illnesses with a vengeance.

Following this is the band's first radio hit "Killer Queen", and at this point the band takes a sharp turn from their previous sound. It definitely paid off for the band and gave them the song that would define its sound for several years. Following this is a sort-of medley of three songs that are masterfully connected to each other: "Tenement Funster" sung by Roger Taylor and John Deacon subbing for May on guitar, the fast and furious "Flick of the Wrist" with Mercury's octave wide vocals and May back at the guitar, and then the more ballad-like "Lily of the Valley" where Mercury gets to show off his Broadway style vocalizations. The first side ends with "Now I'm Here" returns to a heavier rock sound with some excellent guitar riffs from May and more Mercury style antics with a song about Queen's touring days with "Mott the Hoople"

Side two is bookended by the two parts of "In the Lap of the Gods", though the songs are completely unrelated. The trademark vocal overdubs are quite apparent in this track as the music almost takes on an operatic, choir sound, another thing the band would become famous for. The overdubs are done by Mercury and Taylor. The thing that is featured here mostly is Taylor's operatic style voice that ranges from deep notes to extremely high vocals that are apparently still in Taylor's normal range, not falsetto. This is followed up with "Stone Cold Crazy", the song that has been credited for being a foreshadowing of thrash metal and hinted at punk music (not for the last time for the band) and has been famously covered by Metallica. Again, the extremity of styles continues to be showcased with the short ballad "Dear Friends", and then the more happy sounding track "Misfire" which was John Deacon's first song written solely by him for the band where he plays most of the guitars.

The variety continues with the Jim Croce-inspired, ragtime sounding song "Bring Back that Leroy Brown". Queen proved it could flit from one style to the next with ease, and they would continue this for several albums to come. This was the band's strength. The vocals are again layered and overdubbed with Mercury singing and playing grand and honky-tonk style pianos and May playing a quick banjo-ukulele solo. The heavier and much darker track "She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos)" brings in the brooding feel of the band with a nice May-written and sung track featuring him and Deacon on acoustic guitars and dramatic effects at the end of the track. The album ends with what was considered a song that an audience could sing to "In the Lap of the Gods? Revisited". It was a foreshadowing of the stadium tracks that band would love to make like "We Are the Champions" with a repeated wordless vocal melody that the audience could easily mimic and served for an effective barnburning show ender up until 1977.

Every one of the tracks on this album is non-filler and serves to showcase the band's versatility, and Queen still is the band that sits first in most people's minds as the band that could play any style and make it sound like they invented it. Even though each individual track, for the most part, might not be considered progressive in and of itself, but the fact that an album could unpredictably move from one musical style to another without a hitch while throwing in their amazing trademark over-the-top sounds and performances makes this band truly a progressive band, at least up through the "Jazz" album. There are several bands out there that are "Glam" bands that are also considered progressive, like Roxy Music, David Bowie, Be Bop Deluxe, and others. Glam and Progressive music at one time were usually synonymous during the seventies, which is why these bands are considered progressive as long as they could stretch the boundaries of rock, which Queen also did, but more through the meshing of styles from other genres. This is my argument that Queen is a progressive band, but these days many people don't seem to agree with this. Their individual songs might not have been as complex as "Genesis" for example, yet even "Genesis" in their early days had elements of the glam bands in their shows and music.

As far as this album, it has always been a favorite of mine, and I could easily give it a five star rating just out of emotion and personal preference, but for progressive purposes, it only rates as a four star, mostly because the sound is a bit more choppy not flowing quite as well as some of their future, more popular albums would be. I think if it hadn't been so rushed that it could have been as slick as "Night at the Opera" or "News of the World", but it does showcase a band that was brave to stretch rock beyond its normal boundaries by adopting and infusing other styles. No one did it better than Queen did and they paved the way for other bands to do the same in the future.