Two years after selling Empire by the million, the quintet out of Bellevue took the stadium chorus that had paid for everything and dismantled it pipe by pipe, the way an organist pushes the stops back in one at a time until a single reed is left sounding in an empty nave, and Promised Land is what that last reed sounds like. It is the bravest record Queensrÿche ever made. It will also disappoint anyone who comes to it looking for a second Empire. You either hear the reed or you do not.
The five men who had just filled American radio cut their fifth album in a scatter of rooms between August 1992 and May 1994, some of them their own homes, others The Dungeon and Big Log Studio in Seattle, Triad Studios in Redmond and Music Grinder in Hollywood, with James Barton producing beside the band and mixing the result at Bad Animals in Seattle in the summer of 1994. EMI released it on 18 October 1994, four years after Empire. It went to number three on the Billboard 200, higher than anything they had released before. It went platinum. And it sounds like nothing that should have gone platinum in 1994.
It was just Chris and me and our engineer for six months.
Geoff Tate on the log cabin sessions, Thunder Underground podcast, February 2022
The line-up is the classic one, used differently. Geoff Tate sang, played keyboards and, for the first time on a record of theirs, saxophone. Chris DeGarmo played guitars, piano, cello and sitar. Michael Wilton played guitar, Eddie Jackson bass, and Scott Rockenfield drums, percussion and the tape effects that hold the whole record together. That last credit matters more than it looks.
Consider how it opens. "9:28 a.m." is Rockenfield's piece of musique concrète, built from sounds he recorded himself, running from a heartbeat through a death to the cry of a newborn, and named after the minute he was born. It cuts straight into "I Am I", where DeGarmo brings in a real sitar and the harmony leans east, and in less than two minutes the album has sawn through the arena rigging the band had spent a decade hanging. The dynamics here are built from texture, not volume. Headphones will reward you far more than a car stereo.
The heaviest thing on Promised Land is not a riff. It is a man singing to a father who died while the song was being written.
The darkness is the point. Tate sings in a lower and warmer register than the operatic peaks of the eighties, the arrangements breathe instead of shout, and the shadow of Pink Floyd's Animals and The Wall falls across half the record like a dust sheet over a concert grand. "Damaged" is the exception, a bass-driven rocker that kicks the arena door back open, the one song an Empire listener would recognise on first hearing. "Out of Mind" is acoustic, about a mind coming apart, with a solo that drifts rather than climbs.
"Bridge" is the emotional centre. DeGarmo wrote it about his father, who had left the family, tried to come back, and died during the sessions. It became a single and reached number six on the American album rock chart, and it strips every layer of varnish off the band until only an acoustic guitar and a grown man's grief are left in the room. That is exactly why it works.
The title track, the first song in their catalogue credited to all five members, is the best thing here and the most complete statement of the method: saxophone, a long Floydian opening, a structure that refuses to hurry toward its chorus, and the murmur of a bar where it ends, as if the band had melted down the hook and recast it as atmosphere. "Disconnected" follows with funk in the bass, saxophone fills and a half-spoken vocal, the strangest song they had recorded and the one most likely to divide a room.
Now the limit. The second half loses its nerve twice. "Lady Jane" is a piano song in the manner of the Beatles that never rises above pleasant, and "One More Time" is a power ballad wheeled back out of the Empire storeroom, a chrome grand dragged onto a stage the band had spent two years sawing into firewood. It should have stayed in the drawer. "Someone Else?" rescues the ending: piano and voice alone, and one of the finest vocal performances Tate ever put on tape.
So, to whom does this belong? To anyone who thinks the story ended with Operation: Mindcrime, and to anyone who has worn out Animals and wondered what a metal band might have done with that room. Ignore it and you lose the most human record this band made, a fortune in platinum spent on quiet, on grief, and on a reed pipe sounding alone in the dark.