Queen

About

Released in 1973, Queen’s first album is a product of its time: There’s a little a bit of Led Zeppelin, a little bit of The Who, and a few fairies thrown in for good measure. But like the preliminary sketchings for what would later become a masterwork, <i>Queen</i> shows off talents and ideas the band members would flesh out more fully in the years ahead. On <i>Queen</i>, you can hear Freddie Mercury’s penchant for operatic flair (“My Fairy King”), Brian May’s layer-cake guitar approach (“Keep Yourself Alive”), and the band’s overall balance of theatricality and straight-up heaviness that would eventually redefine hard-rock masculinity (“Great King Rat”). Compared to The Rolling Stone, Queen sounded like weirdo sci-fi. But compared to prog-rock bands like Genesis or Ye, the group sounded almost old-fashioned in its directne, as though the four band members had figured out how to take all the imagination and complexity of where rock was going—and synthesize it with the simplicity of where it’d been. That made Queen (and <i>Queen</i>) a tough sell—at least at first. After spending eight months trying to shop the album to label, the group members ended up releasing the album themselve, under a licensing deal with EMI. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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