Queen: A Night at the Opera. DCC Compact Classics GZS-1144.(Review)

Queen: A Night at the Opera. DCC Compact Classics GZS-1144.

DCC's publicity blurb for Queen's A Night at the Opera begins, "Available for the first time on 24 karat gold CD...." It's one thing for DCC to feel a sense of relief that their chief competition in the field of gold-disc remastering, Mobile Fidelity, met an untimely end; it's quite another to pretend that they never existed. The fact is, Mo-Fi remastered A Night at the Opera on a gold Ultradisc II way back in 1991 (UDCD 568). But the important thing, I guess, is that the album is now back in circulation sounding as good as ever.

This 1975 recording is probably the best thing Queen ever did, thanks to its tongue-in-cheek attitude toward its subject matter. Rock commonly takes itself overly seriously, so just as Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap sent up the terrain in 1984, so did "A Night at the Opera" find the field ripe for exaggeration a decade earlier. The program includes a variety of musical types: hard rock ("Death on Two Legs," "Sweet Lady"); folk rock ("'39," "The Prophet's Song"); pop ...