Queensrÿche - Condition Hüman

Published September 27 2015

*=Staff's pick	Arrow Of Time* Guardian Hellfire Toxic Remedy* Selfish Lives Eye9 Bulletproof Hourglass Just Us All There Was* The Aftermath Condition Hüman*

Genre	Progressive Hard Rock	Todd La Torre	Vocals
Tracks	12	Michael Wilton	Guitar
Running time	53 Min.	Parker Lundgren	Guitar
Label	Century Media	Eddie Jackson	Bass
Release	October 02, 2015	Scott Rockenfield	Drums
Country	USA	-	Keyboard
Producer	Chris "Zeuss" Harris
Similar artists	---

I believe that because this formation's former vocalist Geoff Tate earlier ruled the band with an iron fist and decided what was, and consequently what was not, going to make it to the albums, a few of the guys in the band had gathered plenty of song ideas during a long time and thereby were able to subsequently let that material run free on the band's self titled effort and last release, which as you probably know by now also was the band's first album without the then pretty recently excluded Tate.

With Condition Hüman, it seems like they've kind of started from a point close to zero, thus forced to develop their ideas in a much shorter period of time, hence haven't been able to bring forward quite as striking material to this new release as they did with the last record. Without a doubt, this effort needs a bigger amount of time and more spins to work itself into my mind and when it eventually does, I still find its predecessor as the greater of the two.

They seem to have tried to recreate some of the band's earlier work and although they are pretty triumphant on that matter, it's hard to come out with such an impact as they did before. Don't get me wrong. This is absolutely quite a high standard record anyway and in fact it's better and more interesting than pretty much everything Queensrÿche has produced since Empire in 1990. Most of the songs are kind of equally good on the record and it definitely doesn't contain any fillers and every time I listen to this record, it's like I find new tracks to rate as the album's top songs.

The vocalist Todd La Torre is undoubtedly doing an excellent job behind the microphone and the singer swap has definitely turned out for the better. Also the band has obviously evolved its playing skills since they started out over 3 decades ago, but at the same time, a more perfect playing doesn't equal greater and totally awesome songs, just because people are greater musicians than what they were before, as you're well aware of at this point.

So is there any room for Queensrÿche at today's heavy music scene? I'd like to believe there is, yet it feels like almost all of their fans are the ones who enjoyed this unit's efforts already in the 80's and most people that jumped on the wagon in the early 90's, during the band's most commercially successful time, probably don't even know the existence of this record anyway, which in the end means that Queensrÿche has to solely rely on its most dedicated and long-time followers in order to eventually sell a few copies of this new deal.

See also review of: Queensrÿche , American Soldier , Tribe
See also: interview with Michael Wilton

Performance	Originality	Production	Vocals	Songwriting
8	5	7	9	7

Summary
7 chalices of 10 - Tobbe