Queen - Sheer Heart Attack

We're all just going to pretend that i didn't have a near nervous breakdown today, and listen to Queen's third album, Sheer Heart Attack. I don't plan these coincidences, i just leave plenty of space for them to happen. Most everyone sees this album as the turning point for the band, from a perfectly lovely prog-rock group to the intentionally flamboyant, good naturedly pretentious, and overly dramatic titans of Hard and Glam Rock that we all know and love.

But this wasn't really a calculated move by the band, in fact this album was pieced together out of nowhere exactly like the title might imply. They were on tour in the US with Mott the Hoople (aka the band whose only real fan was David Bowie) when Brian May found out he had contracted hepatitis from pre-Australian vaccinations and they flew back to England. They wrote many of the songs while he was recovering, then he also had a stomach ulcer and they just "left some space" for him to record his guitars and vocals later. Everyone who spent some time around Queen has a story about how seriously and workmanlike their studio experimentation was. They "built" their songs rather than simply playing in front of a microphone, and the technicians had an equally long and tiresome workday everyday.

It's certainly an ADD record according to Bottle's Taxonomy, but surely the previous paragraph explains that pretty well. Every track is like a whole universe, an experimental composition on the extremities of recording music, the only chance you'll get to explore the depths of the effects rack and construct moving sound images in the stereo field; the rock band itself as an inexhaustible creative force. 75 vocal overdubs to form a choir and hope that the tape doesn't fall apart in the process, splitting May's echo into its own multi-channel, multi-amp ensemble, songs about prostitutes, gangsters, anything else. They couldn't remember who actually wrote what lyrics to Stone Cold Crazy, so everybody got songwriting credits.

People tend to only think of them as the Mercury Theater, but all four guys were every bit equal; take one part away and the absurdity would collapse on itself. Queen is quite intentionally absurd, but by no means a joke. In a way it's the opposite of a pop album, or maybe an attempt to turn pop itself into theater. It doesn't really matter, it's just so enjoyable to listen to that you can't help but smile.

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