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This week we slapped on our rock-tastic Sony MDR-XB700 headphones to listen to the latest greatest hits collection from Queen. So how does Queen Absolute Greatest compare to the current brace of greatest hits records? Will it rock you or does it deserve to be under pressure?
A cultural crime was committed this weekend, when the X-Factor contestants stamped all over the music of Queen. Not only that but Brian May and Roger Taylor were in on the act, lending a drum battery and guitar support to the vocal sacrilege.
So why did May and Taylor, half of Queen, one of the greatest hit making machines Britain has ever produced, spend a week watching fame hungry contestants gargle their hits? To sell this remastered collection of the band’s singles of course. But with three far more substantial greatest hits collections already available, the sensibly named Greatest Hits I, Greatest Hits II and Greatest Hits III we were a little confused.
But with the X-Factor audience in mind, it makes sense. If like the X-Factor’s blank-eyed blonde, Lloyd Daniels, you’ve never heard of Queen, this would be a good place to start. Queen Absolute Greatest lives up to its title with 20 tracks spanning the band’s career, including guaranteed classics like Bohemian Rhapsody, We Are The Champions and The Show Must Go On.
As with the remastering of the Beatles discography, the studio polish given to the songs to celebrate the band’s fortieth anniversary makes them sound fresher and sharpens the sound of drums and the band’s guitar attack. However the tracklist is extremely obvious and, as with the Foo Fighters: Greatest Hits, Queen Absolute Greatest opts to avoid chronological order. If this collection is intended for beginners, they’ll miss out on a sense of Queen’s development as band.
By opting for a single disc collection, Queen Absolute Greatest has to omit out a horrifically high number of brilliant songs too. Queen were incredibly adept at writing rock anthems and toying with different styles. This collection simply includes the most obvious tunes in their discography which means there’s no space for the guitar madness of Tie Your Mother Down, or the musical hall camp of Fat Bottom Girls/Bicycle Race.
Queen have released twelve compilation albums over the course of their career, four since Freddie Mercury’s untimely death and the posthumous record Made In Heaven. This is the most superficial collection so far, and solely for the Christmas stockings of kids who need a musical education.
If you like Queen, you’ll already own these songs. But if by some twist of fate or generational bad luck, you’ve failed to find a space for Queen in your record collection, this will make a decent stopgap measure.
If you are a Queen fan and feel the need to buy this record out of sheer completist compulsion, plump for the Queen Absolute Greatest deluxe edition which includes 20 audio commentaries by the band, giving the story behind each song. If you’re after a physical format, there’s the Queen Absolute Greatest vinyl or casebound book packages.
As a collection of unquestionably genius songs, this collection deserves five stars but as a relatively quick cash-in by a band seemingly desperate to pin their legendary history to an X-Factor tie in, it simply doesn’t deserve them.
Download Queen: Absolute Greatest from iTunes – £7.99
