by Bryce Napier
Sheer Heart Attack
released November 12, 1974
Elektra Records
“For decades, ‘Now I’m Here’ bolstered my idea of Sheer Heart Attack as ‘Killer Queen’ plus filler Queen.”
I've been re-evaluating my opinion of this record. Released in 1974, a scant eight months after Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack didn’t exactly find Queen firing on all cylinders, but I think it’s where they collectively worked out just what made their engine run. Over time, it has solidified as a dark horse favorite of many fans. It has long since climbed out of the basement of my own estimation, but will a closer look promote it into my top tier of Queen albums?
First, let’s ponder that raw, sweaty album cover art. For a band that projected opulence throughout the 1970s, this particular cover is a curious anomaly, and I must admit it put me off the record for decades, as it felt like gas-station-cassette-rack-caliber visuals unbefitting the band or their sound. I understand now that it was conscious marketing, not lazy art direction, and was meant to suggest a gritty, visceral new direction, but I still think a better cover would have elevated this album's reputation—with me, if no one else.
For one thing, it isn't accurate. While the Dungeons & Dragons mysticism that ran rampant through the first two Queen records (leading to cringe-inducing titles like "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke") is largely dismissed, it does linger on in diluted form with "Lily Of The Valley," "In The Lap Of The Gods," and "In The Lap Of The Gods…Revisited." Furthermore, the album delivers their first undisputed classic track, which set the template of their success for a decade: characters in a heightened state of sexual/spiritual reality, exalted by a luxuriant musical bed of capricious genre-hopping (refracted through a hard-rock prism), supported by that instantly-recognizable male choir. It could scarcely be more over the top. The track, of course, is "Killer Queen." It works like gangbusters, but could hardly be more at odds with that cover image.
The album cover and title suggest they’ve dispensed with the overblown grandeur, that they’re here to seriously rock your world. And while I would agree there is a notable recalibration happening, I’d say they actually managed to get more serious by taking themselves much less seriously. The pomposity they excelled at musically, when applied to lyrical tales of woodland mythology and other such bullshit, effortlessly hurtled over the fence into the pastures of ridiculousness, and is way-hey-hey too easy to roll one’s eyes at. By taking more modest ideas and blowing them up into towering productions, it makes everyday life feel like an epic adventure, no imps or ogres required.
Take the opener, “Brighton Rock.” In just sixteen lines, songwriter Brian May deftly sketches out a story where two people meet and have a deliciously naughty summer fling. Plot-wise, it’s “Summer Nights” from Grease; it’s Dirty Dancing. Yet when Queen bring their musical prowess to bear, along with some florid throwback phrasings that suggest bygone eras, and Freddie Mercury’s innate theatricality, this threadbare story feels like an event that should be recorded in history books. With some prudent editing of the long guitar solo passage in the middle, it would have made a great single—and a much better choice than what was released as the second single, "Now I'm Here" (also by May).
"Brighton Rock" is followed by the Mercury-penned "Killer Queen," which is followed in turn by "Tenement Funster," written and sung by Roger Taylor. In the 70s, Taylor's contributions to the Queen catalogue provided a facet of the band only known to album listeners. He wrote and sang about one song per album, and they mostly seemed to idealize rock and roll as a pursuit for laid-back, blue-collar guys who were content with scraping by, happy to work on their cars and tool around on their guitars. It's like he had no idea what band he was in. Placing "Tenement Funster" directly after the champagne-and-caviar "Killer Queen" is a humorous contrast, though I'd be surprised if it was intended as such. The song isn't bad, but neither is it one of his more memorable efforts. (Oddly, his excellent song "Sheer Heart Attack," a full-throttle ripsnorter that would have perfectly exemplified this album's aesthetic, isn't included on it—it came three albums later, on 1977's News Of The World.)
"Tenement Funster" flows seamlessly into Mercury's "Flick Of The Wrist"—like, brilliantly seamlessly, where it's difficult to tell where one song ends and the next begins. Transitions are one of this record's strongest aspects, in my opinion, and will be mentioned again. As far as the song itself, it is a interesting case. It was technically a single, and a worthy one at that. It's one of only two or three songs that sounds like the album looks; a tough-minded track where Mercury unloads his wicked vitriol on that familiar rock-and-roll chestnut: the artist being swindled and used by music industry pencil-pushers who are solely focused on profit. Unfortunately for the song’s own fortunes, it was issued as a double A-side with “Killer Queen”—which got all of the airplay and renown, reducing the legacy of “Flick Of The Wrist” to an easily-overlooked footnote.
The album moves on—again via a seamless segue—straight into the delicate “Lily Of The Valley,” which I’d peg as the most successful of the holdover fantasy-tinged songs (all of which were compositions by Mercury). I can excuse the lyrical callbacks to “Seven Seas Of Rhye” as an attempt to extend a mythology that I didn’t care about in the first place, with no harm done. The song steadily swells from a piano-and-voice opening until the full band (plus the men's chorus) join in, without ever undercutting the gentleness of where it began. It serves as a good example of Mercury’s remarkable ability to ignore the conventions of songwriting and follow his muse without question, improbably yielding beautiful music.
[Speculative side note before moving on: While I don't know any of this for a fact, evidence leads me to believe that the band mutually agreed Freddie would be the radio voice of Queen. Drummer Roger Taylor and guitarist Brian May would regularly sing their own compositions, unless (I suspect) they saw some single potential in the song, in which case they'd pass vocal duty over to Freddie. (Bassist John Deacon’s songs were always sung by Mercury, I believe without exception.) I imagine this complicated the politics of putting an album together for Brian May in particular (it feels like Taylor, in his cheap-beer-and-local-girls alterna-Queen, was content to merely have his songs go unchallenged onto the albums, with the understanding that they would never be singles—until the mid-80s, at least, when he noticed the extra income that came with writing a hit single, and started writing poppy fare like “Radio Gaga” and “A Kind Of Magic”). It felt like May would prefer to sing his own songs unless they specifically called for vocal drama that his pedestrian singing voice couldn’t deliver. But he’d have had to intuit the commercial prospects of each song during the recording stage, and (again, in my imagination) wish he could have back any of his Freddie-sung songs that didn’t up getting selected. All of which is a longish defense of my point of view regarding the next paragraph.]
Brian May probably could have kept “Now I’m Here” for himself. It was a single (and thus sung by Freddie), but shouldn’t have been. They have some fun playing with with just where the titular “here” might be during the intro, bouncing the vocals from speaker to speaker. It has some tasty riffing, plus some big lines that are fun to sing along with, but it ultimately isn’t about anything. Or it’s about something so shielded by opaqueness that it doesn’t mean anything to the average listener. As a contrast, “Dragon Attack” (from 1980’s The Game) is filled with even more nonsensical verbiage, but it works because it the song is just about the attitude of its own groove, and the words don’t matter. “Now I’m Here,” on the other hand, hints at concrete things without actually telling us anything: “Don’t worry babe, I’m safe and sound/Down in the dungeon, just Peaches and me.” Later, he’s “Down in the city, just Hoople and me.” At some point, he claims “Your matches still light up the sky, and many a tear lives on in my eye.” And somehow, all of this “made [him] live again.” What? Who is the “you” that is being sung to, who is apparently “America’s new bride-to-be,” but is neither Peaches nor Hoople, whoever they are? What does any of this have to do with being “here” or “there” or anywhere else? It confounds me. Which all makes it sound like I hate it, but I don’t. To my mind, it’s a solid album track that founders under the increased scrutiny of its status as a single. It seems to have been selected for little more reason than Mercury had already had his turn, and was about the right length for a radio song. Any additional snark on my part is due to the fact that it for decades it bolstered my idea of Sheer Heart Attack as “Killer Queen” plus filler Queen. “Brighton Rock,” guys; should have been “Brighton Rock.”
“In The Lap Of The Gods” is the one clunker on the album, to my ears. It kicks off (what was originally side two of the LP) with a sudden searing falsetto from Roger Taylor that startles the crap out of me every time. That epic beginning piles on the drama from there, building with swooning “ooh”s and “ahh”s for almost a minute in getting to a shattering “Leave it in the laaap… OF THE GODS!” [Ed.—They hang on the ‘O’ in “gods” for five solid seconds, but trying to represent that in type makes it read as “goods,” so I couldn’t write it that way. So…yeah.] That process takes us to the :52 mark…and by 1:36, we’re into the resolution and coda. Freddie forgot to stick a song in between those two parts, something to hang the drama on. There’s a great foundation for a song that never materializes—the idea held within the title that we have to accept some things that are out of our control. Instead, we get Mercury singing for 30 seconds in some gloopy character voice which is the one thing on the record that truly irritates me. This perhaps best illustrates the downside of ignoring songwriting conventions. The best thing about the song is the perfect segue into the next track, “Stone Cold Crazy.”
“Stone Cold Crazy” is an absolute highlight, not just for this album, but their entire canon. It’s the only song I can think of credited to all four band members (except for “Under Pressure,” which was additionally credited to Bowie), and it’s a barn-burner that sounds like everyone is having fun, boasting a lean, blistering riff for the ages. You can hear the whole David Lee Roth era of Van Halen in this single two-minute blast. This one has rapid-fire lyrics that don’t do much more than paint a picture of a desperate character on the run, but here it’s all about the unhinged momentum of the song, so it works. This is the other primary song that sounds like what is promised by the album cover.
Then they make a bizarre left turn, putting the album’s closing track next, with four more songs left to go. “Dear Friends” is a minute-long benediction, and very pretty. It feels like an a cappella number (it isn’t; there’s a piano accompaniment). I like it. I like to harmonize along with it. But it’s the kind of truncated snippet of a song that only really works as an opener or closer, and this is clearly a closer. I can’t explain why anybody thought it was a good idea to place after “Stone Cold Crazy,” except as a palate-cleanser. This also leads me to observe that four of the five shortest tracks—all 2:15 or shorter—are bunched together in a row (the fifth, “Lily Of The Valley,” clocks in at 1:45). This really kind of kills the pacing of the last half of the album. (The two longest songs—“Brighton Rock” and “Now I’m Here”—are both on the first half of the album.)
John Deacon’s first contribution to a Queen album as the sole credited songwriter comes next: “Misfire.” There’s an easy joke set up with that title, but really, it isn’t a bad tune. I don’t know I feel that Deacon ever had the songwriting talent of the other three, even though he’d eventually deliver such staples as “You’re My Best Friend” and “Another One Bites The Dust.” My rule of thumb is that if it sounds like a song that the Carpenters could have comfortably covered that same year, there’s a good chance it’s a John Deacon tune. There was probably a time I would have railed against this song’s lightweight pleasantness, more because I needed it to be known that I only liked Queen that rocked than because of any honest assessment of the song. I’ve come to appreciate lightweight over time, though, and “Misfire” at least makes sense to me. It’s inconsequential fluff that’s over in less than two minutes. It’s fine.
“Bring Back Leroy Brown” brings the fun. Its campiness is crucial to the overall record, in my opinion. It’s the forebear of other Vaudevillian volleys of Mercury-penned silliness like “Seaside Rendezvous” and “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy,” and is the evidence upon which I base my theory that embracing that they were ready, as a band, to embrace the comedy inherent in their bombastic theatrics, and became a better band because of it. Its presence on the record helps underscore their self-awareness that a song like "Killer Queen" is archly camp, and not deathly serious. That nuance of tone is the critical difference between trying-so-very-hard and coming off as ridiculous, and being so tongue-in-cheek ridiculous that you come off as sublime. It's also super-fun to sing along with, from the actual lyrics to the "woo-woo" for the train noise.
Even though it's only four minutes long, coming as it does on the heels of four songs in just over seven minutes, "She Makes Me" feels like an epic. Weird: Doing this in-depth look at the album has it only just now dawning on me that "She Makes Me" is the sole Brian May lead vocal on it. Plodding and hypnotic, it's my choice for the overlooked classic from the record. It feels like a double-meaning; she "makes" him in the sense that his love for her completes him, and in the darker sense that his devotion makes him totally compliant to her wishes. (The parenthetical subtitle "Stormtrooper In Stillettos" makes a strong argument for the latter interpretation, but whatever.) It's an awkward juxtaposition coming out of the ebullient "Leroy Brown," but I very much enjoy both songs on their own terms. I think "She Makes Me" would have been an interesting choice for a single; its dramatics are in a Moody Blues vein, and would have demonstrated their range. Alas, it would have also violated the (suspected) mandate that Freddie sing the singles.
The album closes on the revisitation of "In The Lap Of The Gods." I can't tell anything it has in common with its predecessor beyond containing the title phrase, and find it to be wholly more satisfying than the first one—but not so strong that it ought to close out the record, especially since "Dear Friends" was so ready to assume that mantle.
Where does that leave me? We have an album that somehow manages to have merge outstanding transitions and questionable sequencing. Do I view it from the standpoint that it contains an incredibly strong twelve (out of thirteen) songs that I can comfortably give a thumbs up, or that I'd rate fewer than half from "very good" to "great"? Many tracks are weighted down by factors beyond their merits as songs. The seamless three-song suite, along with "Brighton Rock" and "Now I'm Here," makes it feel as if all the fully-formed songs were front-loaded, which in turn makes the last half feel woefully underdeveloped, including two completely different takes on the same title that muddies the identity of both. Yet all my very favorites from the album are from that shotgunned second half. They nail the opener, but flub the closer. It was represented in the public consciousness by an all-time classic single, an overlooked single that could have been a classic, an average song that should not have been a single, and a couple of album tracks with untapped single potential. It has an ugly cover that has unduly influenced my feelings about it for many, many years.
In the end, I feel that while it holds many elements that would lead it to be a great album, Sheer Heart Attack doesn't quite coalesce into greatness. But it definitely sets the stage for the string of great releases that came in its wake.