In this era of iTunes and YouTube the notion of a concept album has been all but killed as a function of digital technologies and the Internet. Gone are the days of “Tommy” and “The Wall” when a listener would drop the needle and let an album to play all the way through. (The LP format demanded it as much as facilitated it. A scratch was forever.) Now music fans browse their favorite e-commerce sites and choose what tracks to download based on 30-second snippets.
Not that I’m judging, of course. I’m as guilty as the next Web surfer. I have hundreds of albums, cassette tapes, and CDs strewn across my home office, but I seldom, if ever, download complete albums. This phenomenon isn’t lost on the minds that create the music. The market drives artist activity and resultantly few of them think in terms of relating dimensions of a single story across an album’s tracks.
But all is not lost for those valiant holdouts who still have attention spans that last longer than, say, four minutes and twenty seconds. Queensryche’s latest effort, “American Soldier,” is a concept album in the tradition of the greats — one that merits end-to-end consideration. What Jerry Lewis used to say about his telethon holds true for “American Soldier”: “If you miss a little you miss a lot.”
The album opens with the strident voice of every squad leader yelling, “On your feet!” signaling that the band has stepped off the line of departure wearing a warfighter’s boots. The elements of combat inform songs like “Hundred Mile Stare,” “If I Were King” (also the album’s first video, which had its world premiere at Military.com), and “The Killer.” Voices of real vets weave in and out of the tunes, giving the narrative a transcendent company-street cred. Aviators are also brought into the battle with the slow build of “At 30,000 feet.”
“American Soldier” also tackles themes of war beyond the fighting. “Remember Me” deals with couples who deal with the pitfalls and pressures of getting married right before a war rotation. (Key lyric: “I don’t know what the future holds, I’m sorry if this seems too cold; a man conflicted in his head, makes poor choices, regrets the words he says.” But the subject sums up his thoughts with “All I want from you is for you to tell me that you miss me.”) “Home Again” opens with a voice that states, “It’s very hard to keep a family together when you’re halfway across the world. A lot of us are dads; a lot of us are husbands, and we’re just counting the days to get home.” From there the song morphs into a poignant exchange between father and daughter. (The girl singing is actually lead singer Geoff Tate’s daughter.)
My main concern when I first heard about this project was the “Soldiers as victims” trap that these sorts of projects (whether albums, films, or books) too often fall into. Too often the only takeaway from the military experience is trauma, heartache, and personal devastation. (I generally think of Metallica’s “One” as the perfect cartoon-ish example of this phenomenon.)
But “American Soldier” deftly avoids this trap, primarily because Tate developed the concept by letting servicemembers, including his father, and families tell their stories without clouding the message with his own preconceived notion. In fact, in a recent podcast interview at Military.com, when I asked Tate what he learned about the military by virtue of putting the album together, he said, “I learned I knew nothing going into this.” The album isn’t a recruiting poster, necessarily, but it’s an honest reading of what happens when brave Americans are sent to war.
From a musical point of view “American Soldier” is well-produced, aptly complex, and hook-laden. My acid test of a good album has always been whether or not it gets better with each listening, and “American Soldier” does. There are no throw-aways on this one, but for me the standout tracks (read “download now”) are “Hundred Mile Stare,” “If I Were King,” “Remember Me,” and “Home Again.”
So walk a few clicks in the boots of “American Soldier” and rediscover the concept album. Along the journey through war you might recognize yourself or someone close to you. You might even learn something. And, of equal importance considering the medium, you will rock.
