There’s an unwritten law about bands that split into two (or more) other bands but carry the same name. It is the bottom of anyone’s career. Period. GREAT WHITE and L.A. GUNS are not the worst examples, there are more, but you don’t want to be reminded about them, believe me.

There were internal tensions within QUEENSRYCHE way before Tate was fired back in 2012. Nine years before that guitarist Michael Wilton called “Tribe” (2003) a “stale” album and then he added that he’d had preferred to return to the energy of its early years than to watch his band becoming a contemporary adult band. Prescribed therapy included side projects, solo albums and even an attempt to recycle the mighty concept monster “Operation Mindcrime” with a sequel, but nothing really seemed to work.

Nowadays Wilton, Jackson and Rockenfield camp and Tate camp fight over the Queensryche brand. Each side is trying to prove their validity through a new album. There’s dirty laundry too. Geoff Tate gathered a small army of hired hands like Rudy Sarzo, Simon Wright, Glenn Drover and even secured a guest appearance from the ex-PRIEST axeman K.K. Downing , but the end result, “Frequency Unknown” (2013) only confirmed old fans’ suspicions that during the past several years QUEENSRYCHE had become a vehicle for their vocalist’s perspective of songwriting.

The other version of the band decided to continue with a new vocalist- Todd La Torre Другата версия на групата продължи с нов вокалист- Тод Ла Тори, whose name was previously connected with CRIMSON GLORY. I do agree that all these details are quite boring, but we don’t want anybody to get confused here, do we? So what is this new album about? In short this is the best music released under the QUEENSRYCHE moniker since 1994 or since “Promised Land” if you prefer. Only 35 minutes, true, but all the 11 tracks including the dark technological intro “X2” and the interlude “Midnight Lullaby” try to match the titles from the band’s classic catalogue and sometimes they really do. Interesting, but Todd has participated in the writing of 8 songs out of 11 and he wrote “Where Dreams Go To Die” along with the other youngster, Parker Lundgren plus the vet Michael Wilton.

I bet that you need a proof. You will find some after the first spin of the record. While “Vindication”, “Don’t Look Back”  and probably “Fallout” hark back to the period between “Rage For Order” (1986) and “Operation Mindcrime” (1988), “In This Light” breathes the air of “Empire” (1990). You can hear the word “unafraid” around the 29th second, sung in a way that I was thinking was possible only for Ray Adler from FATES WARNING. “A World Without” and “Open Road” sound like they were taken from the “Promised Land” (1994) era.

I won’t say that this self-titled album is absolutely flawless, but it is a big step in the right direction and it needs to be followed by another one, even better and firmer step. No court case will solve QUEENSRYCHE lost credibility problem and this is obvious to all. The only way to gain it again is to have more good records than bad or generic ones.