Remember the Seattle-based band Queensryche? If you do, then you must also remember the album, Operation Mindcrime (forget the second part -- please) a story-based 1988 record that told of unseemly, drug-induced mind control and the strain to escape from governmental clutches. To a fifteen year old rock addicted boy, it was the ultimate album experience before full perspective had been granted: it had cred, and also, its own language.
I knew people who worshipped it. We held listening parties.
Fast-forward twenty years, and side step out of the world of fiction. We know the news: invasion, surge, $4 gas, Valerie Plame, no one can get health care, Homeland Security, etc… The list goes on, and with each addition, we’re one step closer to the world of Mindcrime – right? Orwell had some of it right, why not Queensryche? I mean, right?
Over the last 2 ½ years, the here-to-fore unknown “T4 project” has been working on an album to challenge its predecessor. Seven studios, two continents, twenty-some-odd well connected and intended musicians (members of, to mention a few, Bad Religion, Buzzcocks, Circle Jerks, Subhumans UK) a graphic novel, all leading to one result: another wonderfully dystopian, story-based record. The story here is that of two men, Phil and Jackie, attacked by closed minded bigots at an anti-war rally, thrown into a mass of dread, ending in their demise. There are turns more complicated than described, but the core is there without giving spoilers. The results are mixed – sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes obvious – but the creep factor lingers through all the 10 songs and pseudo-commercials.
Only now, the creep factor comes straight from Fox News into the stereo.
I don’t know if the T4 project has quite the capacity for rock worship that Mindcrime did in 1988, but it is in some ways, a much better (or read: much more real) attempt at a very similar concept. For what this impressive group of artists have thrown into the mix for the T4 project, it’s worth a listen – for support of the spirit of its inception, its validity isn’t even questionable.
The California, cum Canada, cum New York, England and German punk scenes have spoken.
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