The whole case starts with seventeen minutes of tape.
The four players who booked the graveyard shift at a studio in Redmond, Washington, five nights a week in 1982, and who handed the one unfinished song they had left to a singer who had already turned them down once, were Queensrÿche, and the answer to is Queensrÿche power metal is no, with two songs arguing hard enough to be worth a second hearing.
Put out on a Seattle shop's own 206 Records on the strength of a notice in the British press, reissued by EMI America in 1983 and carried to number 81 on the American album chart by a company that had just signed the band to a deal for seven records, the Queensrÿche EP is where the filing under the genre begins.
A thoroughbass is a bass line with a row of figures over it, and the room finishes it. The player reads the numbers, picks the chords out of his own hands, and one sheet serves a cathedral organ, a theatre band and a tavern keyboard without a mark being altered. Now ink every chord in. Write out the inner parts, nail the spacing to the stave, punch a steel die into the pewter plate at every place where a figure used to leave a man something to decide, and what comes off the press is exact, complete, and worth nothing to anybody but the one pair of hands it was measured for.
This music is written in figures. Its records go out unfinished on purpose, with the best part of the song left as a number over a bass line for a field of people to work out, and that is the practice Helloween set in 1987 and that the style has copied ever since. These records are written out.
Why the question is Queensrÿche power metal keeps coming back
The descent is documented. Before the name there was a covers band around Seattle working through Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. Writing for AllMusic, Eduardo Rivadavia heard the Maiden influence on the EP as obvious and the subject matter as dungeons and dragons, which is also a fair account of what Germany would be selling a few years later.
"Queen of the Reich" is the exhibit, and it does look like the thing it is accused of being. A Maiden gallop under the riff, a kick drum driving the chorus, and a voice sent up over the band and left there: few American records of its day sat closer to what Hamburg would build within a few years.
The altitude is the other reason, and the weaker one. A clean voice at the top of a tenor's range became the entry ticket in Hamburg within a few years of this singer already using one.
The voice clears the first test
The first test asks whether a voice carries the tune in pitches that could be written down, clean, with the words arriving whole and no distortion anywhere near the hook. Geoff Tate passes it with room to spare. He passes it, on any honest reading, as completely as the men who later made it compulsory.
That is where the trouble starts rather than where it ends. The European chorus is anonymous by construction: anybody can take it, nothing in it belongs to the throat that got there first, and that anonymity is why it travelled from one country to the next inside a decade. Tate's lines are not anonymous. They are acted, in a tone nobody else owns, and a line built that way is harder to hand to a crowd.
Produced by Neil Kernon, recorded across Bellevue, Vancouver and Glendale while the band posed for the cameras in make-up and costume, and released by EMI America in the summer of 1986, Rage for Order brings the keyboards forward, chops the rhythm guitars into blocks with daylight between them and sets effects on the singing itself. The branch this record belongs to, and what it was answering at home, is this part of the history.
"Walk in the Shadows", lifted off it as a single, is the plainest demonstration. Tate's howl arrives with its dramatic backing voices already stacked against it, and the rest of the band is arranged around the pair like furniture round a stage.
The chorus arrives already finished
The second test decides more than the other two together, and it is not about tunefulness. It asks whether the chorus was written to be taken off the singer: the top note of the song on the title words, early, repeated, inside a range an untrained crowd can reach.
Little on these records was. The hook comes up with its own harmony fitted, backing voices stacked under the top line before a listener gets near it, the whole arrangement sealed before the crowd arrives. Nothing is missing from it. That is the problem.
A chorus that arrives with its own harmony already fitted has nothing left to give away.
One record argues back, and it does so with a single song. Recorded in London with Pink Floyd's producer James Guthrie at the desk and released by EMI America on 7 September 1984, The Warning sent out two singles that never reached the American Hot 100, and the second of them went abroad and stayed there, a monster in Japan.
"Take Hold of the Flame" passes outright, and it is attested in the one place a chorus cannot be faked, the crowd: an anthem, an arena sing-along, a fan favourite forty years on. One song, and it carries the whole exception.
What sits under the riff
The third test asks what is left when the guitars drop out. The genre keeps a continuous bottom down there, an even double kick carrying the whole verse, so ordinary by the second bar that nothing in it registers as an event. On Rage for Order the bottom is something else, a bed of keyboard texture and effects with the blocks of riffing laid over it.
A fermata inked over a note hands the bar to one throat. Every player's eyes come off the page and onto a man's chest, the beat stops existing until he chooses to let it go, and a hall that was moving a moment earlier stands holding a breath it cannot spend. Rule a knife through the bar lines either side of that note and the time has nowhere to start from again. On Rage for Order the singer is the star and the band is laid out around his throat.
Scott Rockenfield drives the EP hard, with kicks pounding under the chorus of its opener, and by Rage for Order the same drumming has been polished while the keyboards and the voice are brought in front of it. What these records point toward is Dream Theater and the progressive bands, not Hamburg.
The closest the catalogue comes to the genre
| Song | The voice | The chorus | What sits under the song |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Queen of the Reich" (EP) | Pass | Pass, a chorus power metal bands have since covered | A Maiden gallop and a kick drum driving the chorus |
| "The Lady Wore Black" (EP) | Pass | Fail, written as a ballad for the voice | A moody ballad with a whistle for an intro |
| "Take Hold of the Flame" (1984) | Pass | Pass, an anthem the crowd still sings | A slow build to a call to arms |
| "Walk in the Shadows" (1986) | Pass | Fail, the harmonies arrive with the lead | A bouncy rock groove under stacked voices |
The tally is two songs on the chorus test, one from the EP and one from The Warning, and both of them come off records cut before anybody in Europe had assembled the style. Only "Queen of the Reich" has a gallop under it, and one gallop cannot carry a catalogue.
So the answer is no, and it is not a complaint. The first and hardest requirement is met here as completely as anywhere in the style, and the other two come loose from record to record, the chorus in its harmonies and the floor in its keyboards and grooves. Promoting the work into the genre flatters nobody and describes nothing.
Where the American question actually lives is one branch along, among the American bands that kept a riff under a high voice and were ignored for it. Sanctuary and Metal Church sit there, and the rest are in the forgotten first wave of US power metal.
What the records show is simpler than the forty years of argument stacked on them. A singer at the top of his range is not a genre, a gallop is not a genre, and dragons on a sleeve are not a genre. A style built out of songs that leave their best minute to the audience can take two of these and no more, and the rest belong somewhere else.
