QUEEN: Made In Heaven (MELODIC HARD ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

1995. Queen releases her last album with the original line-up. And for good reason: Freddie Mercury died on November 24, 1991, four years earlier. Ouch! A posthumous album. Are the surviving members going to sacrifice to the often lucrative, but ethically oh so questionable, exercise of exhuming various scraps, demos, bootlegs and compiling these various elements for a final passage in the cash drawer, taking advantage at the same time of the nostalgia of their admirers and the unhealthy voyeurism of those attracted by the misfortune of others?

Nay! With "Made In Heaven", The Queen bows down in beauty. Yet, at first, the project does not seem to have been won. A mix of tracks remixed in the Queen style, initially recorded on solo albums by Mercury ('I Was Born To Love You', '), May ('Too Much Love Will Kill You') or Taylor with his band The Cross ('Heaven For Everyone'), of demos left behind ('It's A Beautiful Day', '), My Life Has Been Saved') and new vocal takes from Mercury during the recording sessions of 'Innuendo' ('You Don't Fool Me', 'A Winter's Tale'), completed post mortem by the band, the result was likely to be mixed and matched and disappointing.

However, from the opening track, 'It's A Beautiful Day', where Freddie Mercury's tragic interpretation belies the optimism of the title, the doubt is dispelled. The orchestral and whimsical 'Made In Heaven' drives home the point, with an imperial Mercury (to top it all off for Queen!) whose voice rises and falls beautifully. No need to detail the titles one after the other, there is not one to throw away. Freddie Mercury's singing is as magical as ever and it is hard to realize that some of the songs were recorded while he was seriously ill (only 'A Winter's Tale' suffers from a less exceptional performance than usual). The luxuriance of the arrangements, the grace of the melodies, the choruses, the guitar solos, all the ingredients of Queen's great albums are present.

In addition to this, there is a good dose of emotion: it's impossible not to shiver when you hear Freddie Mercury singing such evocative songs as 'Made In Heaven', 'Let Me Live', 'My Life Has Been Saved', 'Heaven For Everyone' or 'Too Much Love Will Kill You' (which doesn't refer to Mercury's illness but to May's divorce, as one might have thought).

The album ends with a surprising track of more than twenty minutes, 'Untitled Hidden Track', a long dark and evanescent instrumental, with tracks of almost silence, closer to the "Rubycon" of Tangerine Dream than to Queen. How to take it otherwise than the rock requiem composed for Mercury by his buddies, the 22 minutes of the track representing the 22 years between the first ("Queen" in 1973) and the last album?

With "Made In Heaven", May, Deacon and Taylor paid Mercury the magnificent tribute it deserved: to end the band's career with an album worthy of its great hours. Magnificent and moving. - Official website

QUEEN

MADE IN HEAVEN

EMI

MELODIC HARD ROCK