You better believe I am listening...

I've seen here and there some people calling Empire Queensryche's sellout album. And to be honest I don't understand why. I've been playing it like crazy the last couple of days. It did have a more mainstream sensibility to it with songs like "Jet City Woman" (the song I bought the cd for) and "Silent Lucidity," but then you also have songs like the title track and "Resistance" to balance it out. It was no Mindcrime, indeed, but it it didn't have to be. I hear them a lot on the Hair Nation channel on Sirius, but I don't think that's quite fair; Queensryche was so far beyond bands like Poison and Bon Jovi they were just a speck on the hair bands' horizon, if that. You could call them the modern-day equivalent of Pink Floyd or Rush. Given the similarities between the voices of Geoff Tate and Rush frontman Geddy Lee, I don't think I can really explain why I like the 'Ryche so much more than Rush, but I do. And the recordings of both the bands are a lot alike, both lyrically and musically. For example, Rush had "Limelight" and that was a good song, indeed...but to my ear, Queensryche's "Anybody Listening?," Empire's last track, is so much better a take on that theme it's not even funny. That one song alone was worth the price of the whole disc. I could listen to it over and over...



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