Queen is awesome. Queen is easily one of my favorite bands ever. But Queen without Freddy Mercury… Does it work? It definitely didn’t when they made a rap version of Another One Bites the Dust. But maybe, just maybe this will be a good return to form.
 
Well, when I read that Queen was making a return, I was ecstatic. Having been a fan of them for a while (but more in the recent years when i actually bought a few albums by them), I really couldn’t wait to see how they’d perform in this “Queen +” project.     

Click to see what I thought about it.

It was in 2005 that Queen announced they would be touring again with Paul Rodgers as the lead singer. John Deacon is retired, so he was replaced replaced by Danny Miranda from Blue Oyster Cult (though I read that for the album the bass duty was shared between Paul Rodgers and Brian May). They did a few tours through the world and released various DVDs and live albums featuring all the old classics by Queen. Now in 2006 they confirmed that they were making a new album with Paul Rodgers. Yay.    

The album
So is it any good?
Well, saying it’s a bad album would be downright wrong.  It’s got a really nice classic rock feel to it and that’s something very few bands can achieve nowadays. The instrumental quality is great and overall just really fun to listen to. The singer isn’t bad at all, and does a good job in most of the songs. 

But is this Queen? The answer is no, not really. Though a few songs do have a bit of a Queen feel to it (Cosmos Rockin, Still Burning, C-lebrity), overall it doesn’t really SOUND like Queen. Part of the reason is because of the singer. As mentioned before, he’s not bad, he’s far from being as awesome as Freddie Mercury.

Overall
Again, it’s not a bad album at all, it’s just not Queen. The music is a different style, the back vocals aren’t close to being as great as in older songs, and the singer just isn’t Freddie. There are a few good songs though. Cosmos Rockin is really good, Still Burning is nice. The overall sound of the album is really good, though none of the songs are really memorable. Really it’s mostly good if you want some nice background music if you’re doing something else.
If you’re a big Queen fan you’ll probably like it, but if you’re new to the band, get a greatest hits or something, it’s not really representative of the band at all.