Awful, just Awful...
I would like to say that this is rock bottom, but they keep redefining what rock bottom is. First they ruined the reputation of Mindcrime by making a bland sequel, then created horrible renditions of once decent songs on Take Cover, then they wanted to bank on the Army Demographic with American Soldier delivering a boring album with WAY to many spoken parts. Then they really disgraced themselves with Queensryche Ca-beret. What a sad spectacle that was. I've never seen a band hit rock bottom so many times. So finally after all these distraction albums, now finally a strait up new Queensryche album, and man is this CD bad.
This album is SO VERY BORING. I can barely get through it, always instinctively wanting to skip to the next track just to find the same disappointment. Pretty much every track is bland and generic with no complexity or emotion. Its like pop music, but its even bad by pop standards and this is a hard feat to accomplish. They embarrass themselves with song titles like Wot We Want and Big Noize. I really don't know who this is supposed to appeal to. Its not going appeal to kids who don't know about Queensryche, so it wont make them new fans, and its certainly going to alienate older fans such as myself. The only people who will buy this are the one's obsessed with QR enough to ignore the elephant in the room and refuse to call a spade a spade, but what ever, that is there problem. In the end this album is just terrible.
It needs to be said that this band is not the same without Chris Degarmo. Degarmo's departure would be like if Jimmy Page left Led Zeppelin, there's no way to compensate that absence. Micheal Wilton is just awful and so is Tate's arrogance and ego. Degarmo balanced everything out and brought depth to the band, much in the same way that Kevin Moore brought depth to Dream Theater, but what ever.
At this point I wash my hands of Queensryche. I had some small hope for this album, but that hope has died. Unless something ground shattering happens ( something the equivalent of Portnoy leaving) then I am done with Queensryche.