FILTER REISSUES
First in line
Time to give the crown another polish: Queen’s debut album rebuilt and extensively revisited over multiple formats that restore the originally intended running order. Plus demos, live tracks and a new stereo mix.
By James McNair.
Queen
★★★★
Queen I
EMI. CD/DL/LP/MC
WORDS DENOTING regal splendour are clichéd when discussing Queen, but tasked with describing this extensive 2024 “rebuild” of the band’s 1973 debut, one must fall in. It comes in a plush purple box embossed with heraldic-looking gold script. It reminds you that Queen have the bottomless resources – and appetite, still – for exemplary archiving. In terms of re-animating the fledgling band’s unmistakable life force, it’s a royal flush. “Queen I is the debut album we always dreamed of bringing you,” Brian May and Roger Taylor have said, alluding to CD1’s stereo remix/forensic refurbishment of the original release’s compromised sonics.
Gone, you immediately notice, is the papery drum sound that at times made Queen’s exuberant hello feel waterlogged. Now, Taylor’s rapid-fire fills near the top of Great King Rat sound like a one-man Edinburgh Tattoo. Better yet, each little element of Queen I’s flamboyant, sometimes preposterous excess now has its own place in the sonic firmament, youthful, incomparable Freddie Mercury close enough to touch. Rest assured, though, that the integrity of the original recordings remains. There are no new overdubs.