Queen as it Began

1974 was a year of high achievement for Queen. They had their first two hit singles, 'Seven Seas OfRhye' and 'Killer Queen,' released two albums, 'Queen II' and 'Sheer Heart Attack,' and completed major tours across the UK, America and Europe. In the UK, they performed three sold-out shows at the legendary Rainbow Theatre in London's Finsbury Park, one in March on the 'Queen II' tour and two in November following the release of 'Sheer Heart Attack'.

This 2008 singles collection from Queen comes housed in a flip-top box and contains 13 singles released between 1973 and 1979, including the hits “Killer Queen,” “Somebody to Love,” “Fat Bottomed Girls,” “We Are the Champions,” and “We Will Rock You," all of which feature faithfully reproduced cover artwork and vinyl-perfect audio…

Notable Italian group Syndone, founded by Nik Comoglio, formed in the very early Nineties, with an expanded line-up delivering a selection of constantly more ambitious symphonic works since that time, 2014's `Odysseas' being their first showing of true greatness. While their latest `Mysogonia' is not a concept album as such, the nine pieces all share a mutual branching theme of women, in some cases the songs highlighting the way love, lust, obsession, depression, jealousy in themselves and suspicion from others affect their lives, and Syndone's keyboard-dominated music, often heavily influenced by legendary British rock group Queen, is presented in conjunction with a multi-piece orchestra here…

To open this oddball supergroup's debut, Paul Simonon hints at "Guns of Brixton," and when Tony Allen's flex rhythms come in, there's a shadow of Fela Kuti, too. Then Damon Albarn's slow grit of a voice enters–framed by Simon Tong's flecked guitar. And collectively, The Good, the Bad, & the Queen is quickly sui generis, adamantly different than anything you think you've heard. A band with this much power has at least two options: to cut loose raucously or to mute their overt power for a more covert, dub-inflected atmospheric potency. Smartly, Albarn and his crew opt for the half-light of elastic bass lines, the clouds between the parentheses of drums–the covert. It's not until "Kingdom of Doom," the erstwhile 'single' of the album, that motion expands beyond the languorous. And even then, Tony Allen largely sits out. You get the full flush of Simonon and Allen on "Three Changes" shuffling time even while holding the tempo to a dubbish gait. It's not Blur, the Clash, Fela, the Verve, or Gorillaz. It's more than just names on albums.