An often overlooked Queen album (aren’t most of them?). Queen II is loose concept album where the first side of the album is meant to have brighter lyrical imagery with all songs written by guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, while the second side contains darker songs all written by lead vocalist Freddie Mercury. As usual the vocals on almost every track on the album are handled by Mercury with the symphonic overdubbed backing vocals of May and Taylor.

The lyrics are also full of fantasy and medieval themes to help give the album’s themes even more cohesiveness, with the exception of “The Loser in the End” (a Roger Taylor song that, while good, shouldn’t have been on this album). Most songs also lead into the next on the album or fade out appropriately, so the whole listening experience flows excellently.

Particular highlights include the soft near-acoustic “Some Day One Day,” sung by Brian May and one of his best songs, and “Ogre Battle,” possibly the heaviest song Queen ever recorded, and one of the band’s definite best songs that you won’t ever see on a Greatest Hits compilation. Same goes for “The March of the Black Queen,” a six-minute progressive rock epic with constant shifting dynamics that predict the band’s most successful song, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Queen’s best known song from Queen II, “Seven Seas of Rhye” closes the album after being reworked and expanded from the short piano instrumental outro it was on the previous album, Queen.

This is my second favorite Queen album, after A Night at the Opera. Many of Queen’s albums don’t work too well as cohesive albums and just feel like a collection of songs (which I still enjoy, don’t get me wrong), but Queen II is one of their few albums that avoids that problem. If you are at all interested in this album or are a general fan of Queen or other ’70s rock, I certainly recommend Queen II to you.