Killer Queen
So I bought the tribute CD to Queen, Killer Queen, and since there are some fans here, I figured I'd throw you guys a review.
1. I'd never heard Gavin DeGraw before his cover of "we are thechampions" and I hope I never do again. He's a third rate Jamie Cullum with more country twang than Jazz flavoring and he sings worse. Do not listen to this track, its god aweful.
2. That one was exceptionally bad, so I had to address it directly but other terrible songs:
Bicycle Race by be your own pet was aweful. I never got that punk mentality that said "lets graft all melody and talent from something and play it with the 80's bratty vocal styling of the waitresses" Its complete crap.
Constantine and the cast of "we will rock you" did do anything special. He lacks the vocal power to match mercury and if you can't keep up, then don't try to copy it note for note.
Whoever Josh Kelly is, I wasn't moved.
Anyway on to the positive. Shinedown did an amazing version of "tie your mother down". Their problem was they wrote terrible lyrics and average music, and my problem with the original was bad recording equiptment and too much techinal experimentation. This took the best of both and made the song fly.
Jason Mraz does an exact version of "good old fashion loverboy" and thats impressive that he gets as close as he does, but he doens't trump the original. Same with Rooney, very close to the original "death on two legs" but again, if you can't beat Queen, don't try.
Breaking Benjamin does a nice version of "Who wants to live forever". They don't change much up but its guitar instead of piano and his voice adds something.
Antigone Rising makes "Fat bottom girls" more country but they do it really well. I think one of the better tracks of CD is Josh Homme playing with Eleven covering "Stone Cold Crazy".
At the reigns he decided to do it in the vein of QOTSA and it comes out really nice.
And if you hear it, tell me Los Lobos doing "sleeping on the sidewalk" doesn't sound like a lost track from Frank Zappa.
I didn't review every song because this is getting long. And I wanted to stick to the track at least worth mentioning. If anyone else has it, leave your opinions.
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