Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Operation: Crime Against Music

I went to the library on Sunday with the wife and kids, to kill some time in an air conditioned environment. There is a small, kinda strange music section - who knows why they carry the CDs they do - that I browsed, thinking I’d take home a few and rip them for my mp3 collection.

Looking through the Heavy Metal section, I came across a Queensryche album I didn’t recognize that had a few of their hit songs in the tracklisting. Jeff had just texted me a few weeks earlier:
Recipe for blowing this day out of the water: go back and listen to “Jet City Woman”. Hearing this yesterday led me to pay real American dollars to buy a Queensryche album in 2015.
He said it was remastered, so I figured this album was some kind of remastered greatest hits compilation, so I grabbed it.

Before I ripped it later that night, I checked Wikipedia for the story behind this “Frequency Unknown” album. Whoops, it was a cash grab featuring re-recorded versions of their hit songs:
Frequency Unknown is an album released by Geoff Tate's temporary version of the American progressive heavy metal band Queensrÿche. It was released as the thirteenth studio album under the Queensrÿche moniker in a time no settlement or juridical decision determined whether Tate or the other band members were entitled to use the name Queensrÿche.
Listening to the redone hits is like listening to a band that re-formed to tour State Fairs. I will not be archiving these mp3s.