Queen: Queen I Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Queen: Queen I Blu-ray Movie Review

Note: Amazon has this incorrectly listed as an audio DVD.

1974 was really probably arguably the big "breakthrough" year for Queen, but this 1973 premiere effort shows the band in fine form, if a form decidedly different from what might be called their more flamboyant era. This first album didn't produce any hit singles (though Keep Yourself Alive and Liar were released as such), and while the album didn't exactly set any global charts on fire, it very respectably cracked the Top 25 in its native United Kingdom, and got into the Top 100 on this side of the pond. While there's perhaps a bit less of Freddie Mercury's more "baroque" tendencies on tap here, you can here nascent glints of Bohemian Rhapsody in little moments like the piano in My Fairy King, which clearly presages the "Mama, I killed a man" section of the later song. But the very fact that there is a song called My Fairy King on this album is a hint to its early seventies "back to nature" ambience. This album received a deluxe remix in late 2024 with multiple CDs and while there's kind of frustratingly no detailed mention in the liner notes of a small insert leaflet, what is there leads me to believe the stereo mixes offered here are the same as on that set, while this Blu-ray also offers a really enjoyable Atmos mix.

Queen: Queen I Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Regular readers of my reviews of audio Blu-rays know I sometimes tend to not even score video if there's minimal content, but in this case the AVC encoded 1080 array of stills and ephemera is outstanding and deserves to be recognized with an official score. This is not a typical "loop" and has obviously been chosen, aggregated and edited with great care. A succession of tune specific information (like original lyric sheets and/or charts) is interspersed with great photographs and other printed material from Queen's very early days. Imagery pans from right to left nonstop throughout the entire album, and the only real downside is that some may need to pause here and there to read various items, which of course stops the music.

Queen: Queen I Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Queen 1 features Dolby Atmos and LPCM 2.0 options for the album, and then another LPCM 2.0 option for the backing tracks, which include backup vocals. The Atmos mix is impressively immersive from the get go, with a really fun clockwise introduction of channels beginning with the left rear and then moving around until the entire soundstage is coming at the listener from all sides. There is some absolutely ferocious guitar positioned in the left rear channel in particular (though often in both rear channels) throughout several tunes, and what's so interesting is that these aren't necessarily big "solo" moments, but just bursts of frenetic activity that can almost engender a startle response when they suddenly emanate from a discrete channel. This is an interesting vocal effort for the band, and several of the tunes can tend to feature unison singing with breakouts into harmony on selected words or even syllables, and so it is perhaps understandable that voices tend to be anchored pretty firmly across the front channels. In terms of the "provenance" of these mixes, the liner notes do overtly state "2024 mix", and then offer that Brian May and Roger Taylor were executive producers, with the stereo mixes produced by Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J. Macrae and Kris Fredriksson, and the Dolby Atmos mix produced by the above trio along with Lewis Jones (from Abbey Road Studios).

Queen: Queen I Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

I'm really kind of prone to suggesting the array of ephemera offered on what I'll call the "video track" of this Blu-ray could really be considered a major supplement for Queen fans, since it is chalk full of all sorts of goodies, but that said, the disc has no supplements in the traditional sense. The DigiPack includes a 12 page insert booklet with lyrics, stills and production credits.

Queen: Queen I Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Though it may reference the title of an album by another iconic British band, I often find my life filled with synchronicity, and in that department it made me laugh out loud to see a social media post today just as I was getting ready to write this review from author AJ Jacobs about how he "broke" ChatGPT by asking it to alphabetize all the words in the lyric of Bohemian Rhapsody and it spazzed out on "me", repeating it in an infinite loop. There's probably no similar "threat" lurking in the words of this fun debut effort from Queen, but adventurous types might want to try, anyway. This is a hugely enjoyable listen, even if it may not match the elegance and bombast of later Queen efforts, and the Atmos mix is just flat out fun and may actually help to partially rehabilitate this album's kind of weirdly lackluster reputation. Recommended.