Queen: Sheer Heart Attack

(Elektra)

Reviewed by Richard Best

The everglades again: you'll do a lot of wading before anything like terra firma surfaces. Sheer Heart Attack is a good title but seven of the 13 tracks on it aren't sheer, none of 'em are sunny and only one ("Flick of the Wrist') is convulsive enough to induce listener heartburn.

Queen, or more rightly Freddy Mercury, have a problem: How to tell your polytechnic '68 mates they're just not needed any more.

The bugger-off story shines best in Eric Carmen who may be a teenage broke-heart en chanson but frosted ice in the management/economics circle. When it came time last year to tidying up The Raspberries' viability outlook, David Smalley and Wally Bryson, Carmen's bosom pals from Cleveland College, were cast out and the new-look group climbed up out of the muck with a hit LP and a big hit single 'Overnight Se nsation',

Freddy should take a lesson.

His sweet with the emphasis on choric vocals and change-da-riff-alla-time are far and away Queen's best asset and sometimes he amuses, as in the continuing saga of the Seven Seas of bye.

Side one, for instance, would be mary if fellow-Queenists, Brian May and Roger Taylor, had stayed out of the picture. 'Brighton Rock', a longish contribution from May, is Ok but his 'Now I'm Here' and Taylor's 'Tenement Funster' are heavy fluff alongside Mercury's pieces.

Slip into side two and all this back-handed talk looks fair enough. It's booring like the Guess Who's last four albums and even Mercury takes a dive into banality with his two-part 'In the Lap of the Gods'.

The solution lies in pulling in the reins. Namely, pulling in May and Co and leaving the song-writing to Mercury.

Any old queen worth her gold tiara knows her politics: like, keep democracy out of the monarchy.

Freddy should take a lesson.