Operation:Mindcrime
The Key
Frontiers Music Srl – 2015
http://www.operationmindcrime.com
After a nasty split and a protracted legal fight with his former bandmates in Queensryche, singer Geoff Tate has formed his new musical project and named it after Queensryche’s most famous album.
During the legal fight, Tate and the other three original members of Queensryche toured as separate bands each using the band name. They also each released an album under that name. As one of the few people who thought Tate’s Frequency Unknown Queensryche album was the better of those two releases, I was hoping for more material along those same lines.
Unfortunately, Geoff Tate’s continuing schizophrenic musical choices continue to confound listeners for the most part. While he reaches for new and different artistic directions, he seems to be turning his back on his rock past. Stretching your artistic boundaries is one thing but obliterating the past makes for a hard road to hoe for fans. The Key is touted as the first in a trilogy of albums from the band, but the up and down quality of the songs makes me wonder if they’ll make it that far.
You’d think the band would want their opening track to really pop and grab the listener, but instead you get “Choices”. This is a song that takes forever to get going as it fades in rather than fading out. It makes the song come off as some really pretentious twaddle.
Now, I noted that Tate seems to be turning his back on his rock roots, but there are moments where it seems the music is geared toward a heavier rock sound. With a recording lineup that includes former AC/DC and Ronnie James Dio drummer Simon Wright, Disturbed bassist John Moyer, Megadeth bassist David Ellefson and ex-Whitesnake drummer Brian Tichy, it would be a musical crime to restrain the players to the album’s weakest material.
There is a heavier vibe to “Burn” and “Re-Inventing The Future” is a marvelous uptempo rocker (see the video clip below). Keyboardist Randy Gane brings a 70’s prog rock feel to his solo on “Ready To Fly” and mines that same vein on the instrumental follow-up “Discussions In A Smoke Filled Room”.
I was a little surprised that for a band built around a singer, that Tate would have someone else sing lead on a track. In this particular case, Marc Daly of The Voodoos handles the vocal chores on “Life Or Death?” Strangely enough, the song is actually rather good.
At times the sound of the album sounds messy or muddled. I’m sure at least part of the blame for that can go on guitarist/mixer Kelly Gray. I’ve never understood what Gray brings to the table that Tate likes so much. When Gray replaced Chris DeGarmo in Queensryche, it was an utter disaster and he was soon canned. But here he is with his fingers in more than one pie once again.
Fueled by a conspiratorial spoken word intro, the track “On Queue” feels like something you’d hear in a noir thriller. Meanwhile, the musical undercurrent on “Hearing Voices” keeps things moving along and interesting throughout the length of the song. The album peters out as it ends with the instrumental “An Ambush of Sadness” leading into “Kicking In The Door”. Both are entirely too quiet in tone and made me want to just take a nap until it was over.
By far the most disappointing track for me was “The Stranger”. While it had an up tempo drive and rocking crunch to the music, I spent the whole time listening to this song horrified by the vocal track where I thought Tate was going to break out into a full blown rap performance rather that actually sing.
I don’t know where this story Tate is supposedly telling will go, but I do know that if he continues to have Operation:Mindcrime chart their musical journey with so much in the way of bombastic tomfoolery, there’s not going to be many people listening in the end. The good doesn’t outweigh the bad on The Key.
This was like watching the slow descent of a former musical icon into irrelevancy; a 20-year spiral that leaves you wondering what in the world Geoff Tate was thinking.
