Queen’s 1973 Debut Gets a Glorious Sonic Upgrade That Transforms It From Black-and-White to Living Color: Album Review

Queen’s 1973 debut album has always been an outlier in the group’s catalog. Yes, it’s a vivid opening statement that set the stage for the glorious creativity and bombast — the heavenly voices, snarling guitars and baroque flourishes — that would peak with “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “A Night at the Opera” just over two years later. But the album suffered from a muddy mix that made it feel stiff and unfocused, a situation probably not helped by the fact that most of it was recorded on borrowed equipment in the middle of the night, when the studio owned by the unsigned band’s managers was available for free.

Queen were a complex and ambitious band, so it’s not surprising that the relatively inexperienced outfit’s debut album would be imperfect. But at times that complexity and ambition came out jumbled, and some of Freddie Mercury’s lyrics were so loaded with Biblical imagery that the group could have been mistaken for an early Christian rock outfit.

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Still, that first album includes the group’s fiery first hit, “Keep Yourself Alive,” as well as towering rockers like “Liar,” “Son and Daughter” and “Great King Rat” — and it also included a song immortalized in the “Bohemian Rhapsody” biopic, the lilting “Doing All Right,” which was first recorded by guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor’s previous band, Smile.

A half century later, “Queen I,” the lavish six-CD 50th anniversary-ish deluxe re-release of the album, shows just how much of the underwhelm was caused by that muddy mix. The bandmembers have said for decades that they were unhappy with the album’s sound, and here it has been given such a dramatic sonic overhaul that, to use an overplayed but accurate analogy, hearing it is like seeing “The Wizard of Oz” shift from black-and-white to color.

May insists in the press materials that “All the performances are exactly as they originally appeared in 1973,” but clearly this notoriously perfectionist band has done just about everything else, going back to the original multitracks and tweaking the sound of every element, giving the vocals and instruments — particularly the drums — a punch, detail and clarity that previously was lacking. They’ve also added the jaunty and awesomely titled “Mad the Swine” — a song dropped from the original album at their label’s insistence — into the spot in the sequence they’d intended.

The full deluxe edition spelunks as deeply into the archives as any fan could want, with a disc each of early takes and instrumental versions; a demo recorded in late 1971 with versions of the songs that are sometimes better than the album renditions; and related live material and BBC radio sessions. As a lo-fi bonus, they’ve exhumed a live version of their early song “Hangman” (which apparently was never recorded in the studio) as well as a pair of tracks from one of their earliest concerts in August of 1970.

Most interesting of the previously unreleased material is the “Sessions” disc, containing early, loose takes of songs from the album, often with just acoustic guitar, bass, drums and vocal. While it’s remarkable to hear how far the songs would travel to reach their massively arranged final versions, most entertaining is the banter — cries of anguish or good-natured mockery over mistakes, like the tongue-in-cheek argument between the bandmembers over who messed up the first take of “Mad the Swine,” with Taylor mimicking Mercury in a Monty Pythonesque old-lady voice and May asking rhetorically, “What do you think this group’s called?” — someone replies “Queen Bitch!” (a then-new song from David Bowie’s “Hunky Dory” album).

Much of the archival material here has been available for years, and like other similar boxed sets, there is a lot of repetition — we get seven different but similar versions of “Keep Yourself Alive” and “Liar” and multiple versions of most of the others. But “Queen I” is a definitive record of the first chapter in the career of one the most popular and influential rock bands of all time. Was it given the equivalent of sonic steroids? Probably. But does it sound approximately five million times better? Absolutely.