Queensryche: Operation: Mindcrime II

A few weeks ago I reviewed Operation: Mindcrime on Nostalgia Equals Distortion.  To be honest I had no idea this sequel existed until I was trying to get a copy of the original to review.  A sequel to a rock opera 18 years & 7 albums later?  Weird idea.  Strangely the album takes place 18 years after the original album with the lead character (Nikki) who went to a hospital in the first Mindcrime (after murdering politicians & killing his girlfriend & having a mental breakdown) getting out of jail.  The story is darker than the original.  I guess when you get out of prison for murdering politicians & members of religious orders, it’s hard to get your life restarted; so the guy falls in with drugs (he’s a drug addict recruited as a revolutionary soldier in the original) & goes on a hunt for the leader of the revolution from the first album (Doctor X) who is now just a random wealthy businessman (I guess we all lose our ideals somewhere along the way).  After killing him he really starts to miss his nun girlfriend that he’d killed 18 years ago & her ghost appears & tells him to kill himself, which he does.  Then the dead ghost lovers chat about how the only time they were happy was together.  Pretty bleak, even by my standards.

Granted this doesn’t have the nostalgia aspect of the original for me, but this album just doesn’t seem as good.  There don’t seem to be any songs strong enough to stand alone on this & the music suffers for the story telling.  The blaring 1980s keyboards are gone, but I guess I actually kind of miss them.  I mean, I am not really that into Queensryche or the type of heavy metal they make, but that genre was doing more interesting things in the 1980s than it was 20 years after that.  In the 1980s theatrical glam-metal was still a bit experimental as far as figuring out what was allowed in the genre.  Maybe because at the time trying to be pop bands rather than cater to a particular demographic.  I guess that’s true with all genres of music.  It starts off as just music or as pop music or rock & then it gets pigeonholed until the good bands in the genre have their legacy obliterated by imitators.  & of course unfortunately if a band stays around long enough, it ends up that they are a bit of a parody of themselves playing it safe.  Bands like Kiss or Aerosmith come to mind, together for 40 years with clearly most everything of value in the first half of their career.  So maybe this was Queensryche trying to go back to their roots & kickstart something, which I guess could be condoned; or maybe they were trying to update their ideas to sound more 2005, which is just a bad idea.

Also I’m not sure this is a story that needed to be told.  I think one of the things that really makes the story of Mindcrime work is it starts & ends a bit in the middle of things without trying to straighten every detail.  I don’t like the idea of telling all the details.  I don’t need to know what happened after Nikki went into the hospital & I don’t need to know how the stage was set for the revolution (if they ever do a prequel album).  Leaving things open-ended leaves space for interaction & play in the listeners mind.  It leaves space for conversation (either actual or mental) about the art.  This ends with everyone dead & nothing to say.