the first 3 queen albums.

Interesting list - but is it much fun listening? So many versions of "Keep yourself alive" and most of them are basically the same take. I still prefer the original albums and a good live concert of that era.

 

Queen 1: Interesting, a little rough around the edges. Hints at the artfulness to come, but not quite fully realized.
Queen II: Great album. Smooths the edges, and better songwriting. Cohesive and artful.
Sheer Heart Attack: Holding pattern, some excellent songs, some not so much. Less artful and more just a collection of songs.
Night at the Opera: Great album, very cohesive, very eclectic, fully and terrifically realized.
Day at the Races: Attempts to replicate Night at the Opera. Still a very good album, not not quite the greatness of Night at the Opera.
(and then things started to slowly decay)

 

They're solid through Jazz, but yes, the first three are in a league of their own. Opera is a good album and it's clear they intended it as a "big statement," but it is a half a step down from the first three.

 

Great albums and incredibly influential IMO. I like the first 4 the most. There was recent article about the making of Queen II in Classic Rock Magazine. Great unreleased photos.

 

Queen - Rough but right. Fantastic start with the pieces laid out, ready to be put together.
Queen II - The blueprint for hard-rocking '70s. More of a declaration of intent than the first album was.
Sheer Heart Attack - To me, their Revolver to...
A Night At The Opera - ...their Sgt. Pepper.
A Day At The Races - Picks up where Opera left off. Not as consistent, but the high points are some of the best.
News Of The World - Such a strange album. Eclectic, but pared down in an almost punk way.
Jazz - First spinning of the wheels, somehow. Lots of good songs, but seems slightly tired.
The Game - I always liked this, despite its shortcomings. They hooked up with Mack at the right time.
Flash Gordon - Probably confused by many for being a proper album, which it isn't. It's a fantastic and inventive soundtrack, though.
Hot Space - Will defend to the death. Pre-dates Thriller by several months, and isn't "all disco" like the historians have painted it. The band just branched out into dance/soul, with plenty of room left for the rock and signature ballads.
The Works - A return to form, but a self-conscious one.
A Kind Of Magic - Their worst, IMO.

After that, it gets murky. I can't hear the later albums as anything other than the band trying simultaneously remain business as usual while dealing with the fact that Freddie was terminally ill. Makes for a sad, somewhat uncomfortable listen.

 

I have Sheer Heart Attack on vinyl and I like quite a lot of it. I'm not familiar with the first 2 albums, except for the singles "Keep Yourself Alive" and "Seven Seas Of Rhye". I'll have to check them out one day.

 

I don't see the following albums so negative, but I think the point of this break was a question of money.
From "News of the World" onwards both Taylor and Deacon demanded two songs each on every album. Up to that point May and Mercury were the main writers. And although both Taylor and Deacon managed to write several great hits in the years to come, not all of their stuff was really great. Tracks like "Who needs you" or "Fight from the inside" never went to my heart.

 

I didn't know that...Really? Taylor and Deacon BOTH got 2 songs per album going forward, or about 40% of each album was allocated to them regardless of quality. I can see where that would severely disrupt the quality of the finished product. (Democracy rarely leads to the best art). Hmmm...

 

I like Brian May's playing on 'Jesus' (on the first album). Very Fred 'Sonic' Smith. He was quite a hooligan when he wanted to be.

 

Yes it is a great listening experience. I'll be getting some more masters very soon from the first 3 albums with different takes and live performances so this list will be altered very soon but i am pleased with how it turned out.

 

I find Sheer Heart Attack to be the best of the first 5. The first two were simply getting their feet under them. SHA is not only where they found their footing, but learned to dunk. Opera has incredibly high moments, but is doused with filler. Races, on the other hand, can't meet Opera's highs, but it has no filler, but solidly good to great album tracks. SHA has highs that come near Opera, and it's album tracks are as good, or better in some cases, than Race's.

News of the World is an interesting experiment in stripping down (as much as they could bare to, lol), and has some excellent and interesting songs.

Jazz, was a return to the bombast, and similar to Races, doesn't reach the massive highs of previous works, but the album cuts are several levels above filler status.

The Game is where they became the singles band they would rule the 80's as. Some insanely good singles, some good album tracks, and some near trash.

Hot Space is much more consistent an album, with some interesting work.

The Works is their, imo, creative nadir. All focus on hit singles, and a saccharine slight of an album (aside from Machines). Even their return to heavy (Hammer to Fall) was run through the poppy gloss machine.

A Kind of Magic is half of an insanely good album, and half crap. Still feels singles oriented, but some of the movie/album tracks were a welcome return to rocking.

The Miracle is, again, very singles oriented, but a conscious attempt to rock out helps smooth out the album. Some good, fun album tracks, a couple of pieces of crap filler.

Innuendo is close to being a masterpiece. The title track is shocking in it's return to a 70's era epic. The singles were all good to great, and the album tracks, barring Delilah, were of a high standard. The production really lets this one down. Too synthy, too glossy. The Rocks remake of I Can't Live with You really shows what this album could have sounded like. The only Queen album that I would like to hear remixed (wouldn't mind some additional recording to de-synth it a bit, either).

Made in Heaven - Not perfect, but so much better than it had a right to be.

Sorry about the rambling. Got caught up in the typing.

 

Would agree with everything you say here.

Love the 1st three very much with Queen II being my absolute fave. the 2011 Remaster actually helped with it, though Queen these days keep getting it wrong with their reissues and compilations. In the light of the Led Zeppelin remasters and extra material, it would be Queen releases along similar lines, new vinyl, high res, decent archive bonuses...

 

I can't stand albums 1 and 2 except for ogre battle.

 

QueenII is deffinitely my favorite queen album. One of the most underated albums in the 70s! I just wish it was better recorded! What a mess as far as audio quality! Sheer Hard Attack is a close 2nd.

 

Queen are my favourite band of all time and I particularly love the early albums with Q2 being my favourite. Freddie's writing on these albums was amazing, just unlike anything else: I particularly like things like 'My fairy king' where you just get one section after another and no repeating sections, it's very 'proggy' in that regard. Stuff like 'March of the black Queen' continues this. There's a semi-religious/arabian nights flavour to his material of this time which helps to imbue the music with a lot of mystery, it's really something special. It's sad that the ambition eventually falls out of Freddie's songs after I suppose DATR, though there are still things like 'Bicycle Race' which is pretty crazy for a 3 minute pop song.

I think the lack of top drawer material from Freddie later on is the biggest factor in the 80s Queen albums being a step down from the earlier stuff, though I still really love those later albums anyway. Songs like 'Princes of the Universe' are a real welcome and quite leftfield for him to pull out at this stage being a slice of pop-prog over the more dance-orientated songs and ballads he was usually doing (there is some great stuff on 'Mr Bad Guy' but it all sounds so demo-ish). Like all great writers though he knew that he had to move on and do something different if only to stop the boredom, though I think the drugs and the satisfaction of success also helped to quell the more ambitious songwriting.
Brian May was always more or less consistent having wonderful earlier material like 'Father to Son' and 'The Prophets song' and later stuff like 'Save Me' and 'Who wants to live forever'. His 80s 'rock' tracks do get a bit more generic though sadly. Again though 'Queen 2' for me, is the greatest album I ever heard, both the principal writers on top of their game.

 

Of all the great tracks on Queen II, 'Loser' tops your list?

 

I like them all up to and including 'Jazz' but the first three are probably the best.

 

The first three are exellent, but thanks God they moved forward, experimenting with new sounds and styles. Imagine if they released another 10 albums, exploiting the same succesfull formula as for the fist three - it would have been so boring. What I really love about Queen is that if you have all their discography, you actually can find very original songs in almost any pop genre, all of them graced with the unmistakable Freddie's voice and Brian's guitar sound.

 

I prefer Sheer Heart Attack to A Night At The Opera and didn't take to A Day At The Races very much; it has its classics of course but not a favorite. I feel that way about most of their albums and like The Works more than most of the post-Opera 70s stuff and definitely more than Hot Space and The Miracle. Never owned Flash or A Kind Of Magic.

Queen I is one of their albums I've played the most, easily - I love it to bits. Queen II is very good and although it's not one that I've played too many times, when I come back to it I always ask myself why I waited so song. In fact, I don't have a copy of that right now - or Races... or a few others actually! Probably because I don't feel they're as cohesive as some of their others and I'd most likely just listen to the hits from them on a compilation as the great tracks they contain ARE great - and it's almost always the case (to me) to be the well known singles.

So, Queen I and Sheer Heart Attack - in that order - would be at the top for me and Innuendo 3rd (see, it's not just the very early stuff I favour! ) Queen II? Hmm... around #6 or possibly 5 I guess, which isn't too bad going.

 

Ha...I think Loser is the only track on Queen II that I always skip...

 

I think what happened is that Night/Day made Queen a superstar band--with all that accompanies that. Whereas the first 4/5 albums were obviously labors of love and craft intent on proving the band as artists, once they "made it" the records stared to feel a lot more like cogs in a bigger wheel--sources for hits and tour fodder as much as artistic statements.

The key word in your quote is ambitious: After Day at the Races, Queen's records became considerably less ambitious.

 

Always been my favourites as well, Great King Rat is my favourite Queen song, that first album is brilliant, Hard Rock at its best IMO

 

Can I have a copy please

 

I bought the first Queen album after reading about them in Circus magazine. There were little bits about how their sound was a hybrid of Zeppelin and Yes.
That first album will always be special to me. It was one of the first times that I bought an album by a band that none if my 3 older brothers had even heard of. I was only 13 or so when it came out...and it made me feel like I had discovered something special. I bought a lot of albums blindly back then....there was a lot of experimentation and discovery.
When the second album came out, I thought it was a stunner....but it sounded like absolute crap. So I didn't play it as much as the first. SHA came not too long after...and I remember the radio ad that featured snippets of KQ, NIH and Flick. I was shocked by how much their sound had changed. It was a great ad and it got he hooked. However....listening to Brighton fur the first time....I thought it was horrible and way too out there (vocally).
ANATO puzzled me as well. I kept waiting for the real heavy numbers, but it seemed like so much of it was a 20's-40's homage. I know this as seen as their crowning achievement, but I much preferred the Prog/glam metal of previous albums.
ADATR really seemed like they were trying too hard to duplicate the last album. I thought it was a big step down. Much of it came across as arena rock...although that term didn't even exist at the time. Each subsequent album was worse from this point on....and by the time Hot Space came out, it was all over for me.

 

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would have much preferred Queen had released another ten albums like their first three. If that were the case, they would be alongside Led Zeppelin as the greatest hard rock band of all time.