taylor-mayed's Full Review: Sheer Heart Attack by Queen/Orchestra Regina
This is it, this is the big one. Although the first two albums had certainly had their moments – with songs such as “Keep Yourself Alive”, “Doing All Right” and “Seven Seas of Rhye” – for me, this is the album where Queen really came of age as a group. It was this album that raised them from the level of being just another rank-and-file prog rock band to something much higher, something special, something…. royal.
By the time of this, their third album, they were totally integrated as a group of musicians, they knew how to play on their strengths and conceal their weaknesses, and their song writing abilities had had time to develop and mature through the sometimes-unsuccessful experimentation of “Queen” and “Queen II”. Now they were ready to ascend to their throne as, in my view, the greatest band ever to grace the music world.
The album begins where “Queen II” left off, with the sound of the British seaside. This time however, it is not the fade out of a mass chanting of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’, but a fade-in to the fun, laughter and music of a coastal fairground that leads into the intro to “Brighton Rock”. A Brian May composition, although it does have some lyrics at the beginning and end it is less a song than a hook for May to hang one of his most impressive guitar solos upon.
Always stunning when played live by May, the “Brighton Rock” solo no less impressive when confined to the studio, the power, energy and yet complexity and delicacy May manages to combine in his guitar work really showing how he has earned his place in the pantheon of legendary rock guitarists.
The second track on this album is one of the finest songs to come out of the 1970s – “Killer Queen”, by Freddie Mercury. The first Queen song to really burn itself onto the iconography of a musical generation, this magnificent work was the band’s first international smash it, an Ivor Novello award winner that also provided their American breakthrough.
Queen spent almost as long on “Killer Queen” as some groups spent on whole albums. The worked for weeks assembling the vocal and guitar harmonies, working on the instrumentation and arrangement in order to assure that the entire song was as perfect as they could get it. The result is a wonderfully-constructed classic that has stood the test of time, from the present but never overstated rhythm section of drummer Roger Taylor and bassist John Deacon through the stunning guitar harmonies from May and Mercury’s exuberant, adorable vocal performance that brings life and vitality to his lyric about a high-class prostitute.
Right from the finger-clicking at the beginning you get the feeling of something a little bit special, and as the song build up around the piano and guitar and Mercury’s vocal transports the listener along backed by the multiple harmonies, the ‘Queen sound’ had very definitely arrived at the top. It was with this song that Queen became more than just another band, and even if they had produced nothing else for the rest of their career chances are they would still be remembered for “Killer Queen” to this day.
The task of following such a bona fide classic falls Roger Taylor’s “Tenement Funster”, on which the drummer also takes lead vocal duties. Superior to his writing and vocal contributions to the first two albums, this song has an almost old-fashioned American rock feel too it, evoking images of dusty western towns at the time of the rock and roll revolution of the late 1950s.
Coming so quickly after Mercury’s sublime vocal performance on “Killer Queen”, it would be very easy to criticise Taylor’s singing here and I have never been the greatest fan of his lead vocal. However, this is a very different type of song to one that immediately precedes it on the album and Taylor’s growling, Rod Stewart-style voice does suit it, which is perhaps is only to be expected given that it is one of his songs.
“Flick of the Wrist” is Freddie Mercury’s vicious dig at the band’s former management, and the way he spits the vocal is filled with the very obvious venom the band felt. Despite the fact that it was written almost purely to slag someone off, musically the track hold up the high standards of the album, a hard-edged rock number with a nice solo from May and the vocal harmonies present as ever to give the whole thing the not-quite-heavy-metal polished Queen feel to it.
Such a hard and uncomplimentary song is contrasted by “Lily of the Valley”, another Mercury track much more pleasant in tone, a first appearance on the album for a traditional Queen piano-based balled, a type of song they would use to great effect on the next two albums. Mercury’s vocal is as powerful as always and the rest of the instrumentation that gradually build up on the song leads pleasingly into a very brief guitar part from May that fades out in a rather abrupt but not jolting end to the song.
Track six is a hard rock classic from Queen, May’s “Now I’m Here”, not as fast or anthemic as some of his other contributions to the Queen catalogue but a song that has remained very popular down the years and was always a live favourite for the band. Mercury’s vocal is harder and rougher-edged than some of his others on the album but is still very powerful and distinctive, showing that he could handle rock just as well as he could pop or ballads. One interesting line to listen out for is where Mercury sings of being “down in the city just Hoople and me” – a name-check for Mott the Hoople, the band Queen used to support on tour in the early days, most famous for the glam rock anthem “All the Young Dudes”, which their frontman Ian Hunter sang at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992.
“In the Lap of the Gods” opens somewhat hysterically with a very operatic screech that leads into some pleasant harmonies and a dramatic drumbeat, before this prologue fades out and then in again, leading to the piano which takes us into the main part of the song. This part, a piano-based ballad with an extremely odd distortion placed on Mercury’s vocal during production. To be honest this is not one of the my favourite tracks on the album, the ‘reprise’ at the end being far superior and the production on Mercury’s voice detracts rather than adds to it.
The next song, “Stone Cold Crazy”, is another Queen classic, a heavy rocker with a storming pace and a much ‘dirtier’ sound than you would usually expect from Queen. This was the first song to have the writing credited jointly to all four members of the band, thus giving bass player John Deacon his first writing credit, but it is generally believed Mercury did most of the work, performing an original version of the song with his previous band Wreckage in the very early 1970s.
A real hard-rocking number that moves along at breakneck speed with an energetic vocal from Mercury and some heavy metal guitar work from Brian May to accompany Taylor’s vigorous drumming, this song has remained a favourite amongst those who prefer Queen’s early rock phase to their later pop exploits. A cover version by American heavy metal band Metallica in the early 1990s won that group a Grammy Award, showing that Queen songs could be popular in a whole range of areas.
The hard rocking of “Stone Cold Crazy” is replaced by the beautiful balladry of Brian May’s “Dear Friends”, a short but emotional funeral anthem that is one of the very best tracks on the album. It’s based purely around a piano and Mercury’s tender vocal that wonderfully showcases his singing abilities, with a few harmonies thrown in for support but never overbalancing the song. Perhaps a little too short to be considered a real Queen classic in the truest sense, “Dear Friends” reached No. 1 in the UK singles chart in 1993, some 19 years after it was recorded, as part of the Queen/George Michael collaboration “Five Live” EP.
Another short song, “Misfire”, is an important part of the Queen catalogue as it sees the first solo writing contribution of bass player John Deacon, later to pen such classics as “You’re My Best Friend”, “Another One Bites the Dust” and “I Want to Break Free”. While certainly not in the same league as those songs, “Misfire” is still an upbeat, fast-paced pop song with a nice musical arrangement differing from the regular Queen sound by having a rhythm guitar, played by Deacon, quite prominent in the mix. One reviewer once suggested that Deacon was the only member of the group who was capable of writing “a straightforward pop song”, and by comparing “Misfire” to the rest of this album you can certainly see his point – but as nice as “Misfire” is, if Queen had ever been straightforward in their thinking it is unlikely they would have been half the band that they were.
As if to prove this very point, the eleventh track, “Bring Back That Leroy Brown”, is anything but straightforward and probably the most unique track on the album stylistically speaking. A kind of fast-paced jazz number with ukulele and horns in the mix, this silly but enthusiastic Freddie Mercury song foreshadows later camp, fun songs such as “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Flash”, and is just as enjoyable as those other, more famous numbers.
Brian May makes his only lead vocal contribution to the album when he takes the microphone for his own “She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos)”. Not one of the May classics it has to be said, his voice is good enough but it suffers by being too low down in the mix on this track, the booming rock ballad feel would have been more suited to Mercury’s far more distinctive vocals.
The album closes with Mercury’s “In the Lap of the Gods…Revisited”, a far superior number to the earlier track which it claims to be ‘revisiting’, with a much more anthemic quality that made it one of Queen’s most popular live numbers and a real stadium anthem. Mercury’s vocal, untreated here in comparison to the earlier song, is clear and vibrant and again showcases his abilities to the full – if this man was not the best popular music singer to come out of the 1970s then I don’t know who was. Perhaps this song could have ended a little earlier instead of having so many repeats of the chorus, but after such a good song and fantastic album this is perhaps forgivable.
With some truly outstanding tracks and an overall consistency of excellence lacking in their first two works, “Sheer Heart Attack” really proved to the world that Queen were something special, and had really set their foot firmly on the road to musical greatness. If the first two albums had invaded the music world, then it was this record that began the conquest – although it was to be the next album that would set the seal on it…
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