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GEOFF TATE
Kings & Thieves

Inside Out Music (2012)
Rating: 4/10

Longtime Queensrÿche frontman Geoff Tate is no stranger to the solo album, his self-titled debut being released way back in 2002. His second solo effort, Kings & Thieves, comes just months after his announced split with his former band.

This is a time where he needs to firmly assure his place in the current music scene and establish a foothold for himself outside of Queensrÿche. Speaking of his solo endeavours, Tate has noted: “My first solo album was more introspective, and the goal was to show my influences that weren’t as obvious on Operation: Mindcrime (1988). Having done that, I didn’t feel l needed to do it again – my goal with this record was to make a solid rock album.”

With that being said Kings & Thieves does very little to establish Tate as a force to be reckoned with.

The album opens with a somewhat promising track; a dark narrative entitled ‘She Slipped Away’. Sadly the momentum that is achieved with the opening number fails to amount to anything, instead, itself slipping away into a brooding, uninspired and more than a little monotonous affair.

Nothing really stands out on the album until the listener hits track five, ‘The Way I Roll’, and as you might imagine by the title, it stands out for all the wrong reasons. This song is nothing more than four and a half minutes of swagger, braggadocio, and blatant posturing. The lyrics, which include such gems as “I’m still on top / I’m going higher / standing room only / set this place on fire” and “Can you read the signs in between the rhymes?”, are simply embarrassing.

Things do pick up a bit however with ‘Dark Money’, a scathing critique of the financial politics of America. Lyrically at least, this is the sort of thing we expect from the former “thinking man’s metal” frontman. But things go back downhill again with more tepid rockers doing little to excite the listener until, next to the final song in the album, the one song which saves Kings & Thieves from being a complete washout. ‘Change’, which is a poignant and introspective look in the mirror, is as moving as it is sophisticated. This song is evidence that deep down beneath all the garbage, the man who brought us ‘Anybody Listening?’ (from 1990’s Empire) is still there.

Tate’s voice displays little of the range and power he once commanded. Overall, the album seems quite lacklustre and uninspired. Most notably lethargic seems to be drummer Greg Gilmore who seems to be playing with one hand while using the other to phone his agent. All the instrumentation in fact seems rather half halfhearted, never achieving more than mid-tempo pace and mediocre energy; there seems to be little to recommend about Kings & Thieves.

If Geoff Tate wants to silence the naysayers and once again ingrain his name into the pantheon of modern music, he’s going to need to do better than Kings & Thieves. Much better.

Farron Watson

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