Queen - Jazz [2 bonus tracks] (1978)

Year: 10 November 1978 (CD June 17, 1991)
Label: Hollywood Records (US), HR-61062-2
Style: Pop Rock, Arena Rock
Country: London, England
Time: 54:09
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 kHz
Size: 353 Mb

Charts: UK #2, AUS #15, AUT #8, FRA #7, GER #5, JPN #5, NLD #3, NOR #6, SWE #6, US #6. UK, GER, AUT & FRA: Gold; US & NLD: Platinum.
That much is apparent from Jazz (*****). It was released in 1978, the year it became apparent even to the most cocooned rock aristocrats that punk represented not a passing fad, but a definitive shift important enough to require them to formulate some kind of response, usually in the form of a back-to-basics approach. But Queen had no basics to go back to: they'd started out writing multi-part epics called Great King Rat and My Fairy King. Expecting them to go back to basics was as pointless as expecting Heston Blumenthal to do you a baked potato with cottage cheese, as evidenced by the fact they thought they'd done precisely that on Jazz's predecessor News of the World, an album which variously featured a cod-jazz ballad, a six-and-a-half minute song divided into three "acts", and All Dead, All Dead, three lachrymose minutes ruminating on the death of Brian May's pet cat.
That said, it sounded positively ascetic compared to Jazz, on which they defiantly amped up the ridiculousness to such piquant heights that Mercury's propulsive, sexually ambiguous masterpiece Don't Stop Me Now counts among the more reflective moments. Even by the standards of 70s rock, Queen were strikingly unencumbered by any semblance of good taste. On the downside, that meant they frequently dealt in authentically horrible sounds, not least the tinny, buzzing acoustic guitar with wire jammed under its frets that punctuates Jealousy. But it also meant they did things that no other band would countenance doing. 1978 produced no single as baffling as Bicycle Race, with its weird chord sequence, lurching into different time signatures, massed bicycle-bell solo and inexplicable lyrics. But the whole album is one long WTF?, from Mustapha's cod-muezzin wailing to Fat Bottomed Girls – a global hit, it's worth noting, about a man who becomes a pygophiliac after being molested as a toddler by his nanny, the unpromisingly named Big Fat Fanny: a lesson for us all in ensuring childcare professionals are fully CRB-checked.
(theguardian.com/music/2011/dec/15/queen-jazz-game-flash-gordon-review)

01. Mustapha (03:00)
02. Fat Bottomed Girls (04:16)
03. Jealousy (03:13)
04. Bicycle Race (03:02)
05. If You Can’t Beat Them (04:15)
06. Let Me Entertain You (03:02)
07. Dead On Time (03:22)
08. In Only Seven Days (02:28)
09. Dreamers Ball (03:30)
10. Fun It (03:29)
11. Leaving Home Ain’t Easy (03:14)
12. Don’t Stop Me Now (03:29)
13. More Of That Jazz (04:20)
14. Fat Bottomed Girls (1991 bonus remix by Brian Malouf) (04:24)
15. Bicycle Race (1991 bonus remix by Junior Vasquez) (04:58)

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