Last week I detailed the third album, Sheer Heart Attack, in the first of Queen’s five disc re-release, remastered, deluxe set. This week we look at the fifth album in this set, A Day at the Races.
A Day at the Races is a pretty good album, but one of its biggest flaws is that it’s the album that followed A Night at the Opera. A Night at the Opera is commonly referred to as Queen’s greatest work, and was their breakthrough album, so naturally there was some pressure on Freddie and company not to disappoint. I don’t think they do, but A Day at the Races is not as good as A Night at the Opera or Sheer Heart Attack.
If you think of Queen as if they were Radiohead, A Day at the Races comes off as their Amnesiac to A Night at the Opera’s Kid A (interestingly these were also Radiohead’s fourth and fifth albums). Reason being, Kid A was amazing, but Amnesiac was basically the other songs recorded during the Kid A session and it often comes off as the less good songs from a creative time for a great band. While A Day at the Races wasn’t created at the same time, it gives off a similar feeling. Even if you look at the album covers between the two albums, A Day at the Races is unveiled as a sequel to A Night at the Opera, and both have names taken from Marx brothers films.
Like Radiohead, Queen’s weaker songs from this period of time are still very good, just not as good. The album starts with the rocking “Tie Your Mother Down” (though this song did always seem rather gross to me) and features one of Queen’s very best songs “Somebody to Love.” It also marks the first time that the band completely self-produced their album. On the other hand, the band did not write any of these songs together, unlike their previous two albums, so maybe there is something to that.
Regardless, A Day at the Races is still a very good album. It has plenty of those grand songs Queen is known for, and it rocks at times too, I would just recommend other Queen albums before it if you were selecting one. That said, you don’t have to pick just one as these are all being released together in a fresher, crisper, louder sound and each with a bonus disc that has five unreleased tracks. One of the songs on this bonus disc happens to be an amazing live version of “Somebody to Love” that really captures the awesomeness that live Queen and the showmanship that Freddie Mercury were known for (which is really hard to do on an audio recording). In the end, A Day at the Races is another strong Queen album that makes this five-album re-release an excellent set.
Key Tracks: Tie Your Mother Down, The Millionaire Waltz, Somebody to Love, Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy
Kevin Kozel - Sr. MuzikReviews.com Staff
July 28, 2011
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