OPERATION: MINDCRIME

After the rather transitional and forgettable Rage For Order, Queensryche went the full-on concept album route with Operation: Mindcrime, which is much-acclaimed in progressive metal circles but in its earlier CD versions fell rather flat with me. I can find that on the 2003 remaster (and with speakers/headphones with better bass) I can better appreciate some aspects of the music, particularly Eddie Jackson's bass playing, which manages to be progressive and complex without being flashy or stealing the scene.

Like Pink Floyd's The Wall, the band weave in sound effects and snippets of dialogue at points to create the impression of a narrative, but it's best not to try and concentrate on it too much and concentrate on the music. This rather more straight-ahead fare than the band's self-titled EP or The Warning, but there's some undeniably catchy stuff on here.

That said, I still think an issue with this album is that it's one of the first metal concept albums to have taken advantage of the longer running times available on CDs, which made it possible to produce longer albums without going to the expense of making a double album. In this instance, I feel like some of the album ends up being a bit slack. Had this been a 40-minute album, perhaps it could have sustained my interest better, but as it is the ideas presented seem rather thin on the ground (and the political angle to the story is really quite laughable, on the level of a bad Steven Seagal movie). I think I get the appeal of this one more than I used to (and have revised my rating up accordingly), but I don't think it quite deserves the classic status often attributed to it.