Album Review: American Soldier

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I know this isn't Coheed & Cambria's Neverender as I said I would do, but thanks once again to my good friend Jordan "Hawk" Munson, Queensrÿche's latest album, American Soldier, was brought to my attention. I had to stop the Coheed review and do this instead. After all, I love prog, I love metal, and I love the 'Ryche. We'll return you to your regularly scheduled Neverender review sometime soon.

The biggest issue I have with any Queensrÿche release after 1990's Empire is that I will inevitably end up comparing it to the group's first concept album, Operation: Mindcrime, released in 1988. Mindcrime is my favorite of all the metal albums I own and I have said on more than one occasion that it is the greatest metal album ever made. I might be unfairly setting the bar way too high, but so far, I haven't heard a Queensrÿche album better than Mindcrime. Mindcrime II fell flat, and the less said about Q2K, the better.

And that brings us to Geoff Tate's latest brainchild. American Soldier is another stab at a concept album, this time with all the songs inspired by stories told to Tate by veterans. Sound clips of these stories are interspersed throughout the album in an attempt to evoke emotion. Unfortunately, it fails to do anything but bore me, quite honestly. Perhaps I'm not the intended audience for this album; perhaps I'm just too jaded at this point to care as much as I should. So the spoken word excerpts aren't for me. It's not like they're all the album is. Let's focus on the rest of the album.

It almost pains me to say this, but from the first couple songs, I could have sworn I was listening to a nu-metal album. If I took Tate's voice out of the mix, I could have heard any single one of these songs on top 40 radio five years ago alongside Disturbed and Slipknot. "Sliver", the opening track, even has channel-panning gang vocals, a mixed-down solo, and a breakdown. This, obviously, does not bode well for a band in the progressive metal genre. The first time I heard a song that could have stood up to the top 40 and shoved it down in an uncaring act of defiance, I was more than halfway through the album. Track 9, "Man Down!", has a powerful and bass-heavy leading riff that, unfortunately, disappears pretty quickly once the song gets going.

On that note, there are parts of songs that do stick out to me. "Man Down!" has the riff. There's a brief saxophone solo at the end of "Middle of Hell" that did surprise me, and the group chorus vocals on that same track definitely reminded me of the Empire era. By and large, though, the album is just bland. It's neither particularly good nor particularly bad, but it's certainly not the Queensrÿche I've come to know and love. If they really pulled all the good parts together, they might have enough for one song of their earlier caliber; two if they stretched it. If these guys plan to do another concept album, I'd like to hear a little less speaking and a little more "Speak". C-

American Soldier hits record stores on March 31st. You can pre-order it on Amazon or pick it up at Queensrÿche's official store. The American Soldier Tour kicks off on April 16th in Seattle; head here for tour dates and more information.