Tribute albums - just these two words send a music lover or a reviewer into a state of shock and embrace them with the cold touch of dread. Sure, they were cool ten years ago, I went so far as to purchase a couple including a
Deep Purple one called "Smoke on the Water" (?) and who could forget Yngwie Malmsteen's "Inspiration", where he gave new flavors to old favorites and treated each song like his own. It was sometime after this, in the murky waters after 1996 that it took a turn for the worse. Artists were lined up like cattle, and everyone wanted to pay tribute to any band that sold more than a million copies with well known outfits such as Poison, Aerosmith, Guns N Roses,
Bon Jovi and
Rainbow being treated to a multitude of such thrown together projects by fly-by-nights. All involved looking for the quick cash in, paying true tribute to the artists be damned. The quality became poor, the execution, pitiful, and the originality that would take a classic and twist it into something different was thrown out the window in favor of crazy gimmicks (like Lemmy, singing, anything, really) or "just give us our damn paycheck already" lazy performances. And the market became so cluttered that most everyone that supported these things in the first place, jumped ship.
So here's yet
another tribute album, and finally this time after all these years, it is done right. Like Yngwie and maybe even
Great White before him,
Valensia Clarkson puts his whole being into the music. Oh and for those not familiar with
Valensia, for the past decade he's basically been sharing the previously extinguished torch of
Queen with the other Dutch piano-singing-songwriter prodigy, Robbie Valentine. They both carry the legendary flames of the band and keep them burning in the background of their music while exploring fresh and new territory constantly, keeping these two a little ahead of their game, and sometimes unapproachable for the dyed in the wool traditional
AOR fan.
"
Queen Tribute" is simply that. A tribute to
Queen and almost no one else (a few sort of exceptions are included too), which makes sense, background considered, and this is by far, the best tribute
Queen has ever received, and yes "Dragon Attack" was a favorite of mine back in the day. This is a polished and extremely well done album, which lays down not just the rocking edge of the band, but also captures their spirit, which glows brightly with a nicely shining production that makes the CD sound rich and crisp.
Also of note is the fact that
Valensia does nearly everything. He is the bassist, the singer, the guitarist, the keyboardist. only David Clarkson is on drums but the rest is all
Valensia. His influences, his project, his performance.the spotlight is trained directly on him and does he ever perform! He is quite the prodigy and a little eccentric at that, since he supposedly was going to quit the music biz a few years back only to end up pumping albums out at an even faster rate. Also it is a little hard to remember the name of his third CD, "
Valensia '98 Blue Paraphernalian Dreams of Earth's Eventide Whiter Future & Darker Present Soundspheres From New Diamond Age Symphonian Artworks To Yesterday's Westernworld Rockcraft Under the Raging Nineties
Silver Promise of the Happy Hundreds on the Break of the New Millennium's Hazy Misty Dawn", no I'm not making this up, and that's directly from his homepage. I always just referred to it as "that album with
"Gantenbrink" on it". Quirky perhaps, but all geniuses are quirky, or so they say.
And as for the songs, there's no point in going into tremendous detail for such staples as
"Bohemian Rhapsody" now is there? Let it just be known that no one, and I mean no one has managed to nail this song on the head, with the operatic parts and the whole nine yards with as much enthusiasm and natural ability as
Valensia here.
"My Fairy King" is a new one to me, and with its extremely fruity name I was not expecting much, but really, you have to pinch yourself to make sure you are NOT listening to
Queen, this is how authentic some of these versions are. He continues to be absolutely amazing as he blows through other early tracks such as
"Killer Queen", stadium stomper
"We Will Rock You" and
"Sheer Heart Attack". No new twists, and pretty much a by-the-book kind of affair, like those paint by numbers paint kits, only done by a professional like Boris Vallejo, which is going to turn out much better than some amateur randomly slopping paint on the canvas.
And there's even more songs which I've personally never heard before such as
"Man from Manhattan" that was done in 1977 with Freddie Mercury producing and providing background vocals and piano while Eddie Howell sang the lead, and also
"Polar Bear" that was laid down even earlier, this time in the late 60s by the band Smile that included Brian May and Roger Taylor in some type of precursor to what was to come. Lots of piano here and a firm
Queen stamp with a hippie-like vibe.
"All the Young Dudes" is a David Bowie track that
Queen covered, so is this a cover of a cover?
While mulling over the quality and uniqueness of this particular release, it is a difficult decision on whether to recommend it or not. Are tribute albums an essential purchase? In my mind, no they are definitely not. But if you have more than a passing interest in
Queen or are a
Valensia fan, this is a given purchase, and I believe the score reflects the product. A very good release, but not quite up to the status of "must own" for the majority of the population. But
Valensia does have a truly lovely voice with a wonderful range and the instrumentation is dead-on, and hard to find fault with. Although personally I prefer my covers to be unique takes on the material at hand, and not just recreations, but these are done so well, that it doesn't detract from the overall experience.
Although why
Valensia has decided at this stage to invest time and effort into reproducing another band's work instead of doing a proper follow up to the excellent "The Blue Album" from a year or so back, is beyond me, but he did sell over a million copies of "Gaia", so that creative decision is his own luxury this time.
Written by
Alanna Tuesday, July 27, 2004
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