It's late

Now just for once this post will be in English, mainly just to find out if this 'Sphere widget' at the bottom of this post is any good at all or if we need to kick it (Comment: The widget was kicked. It worked for English posts only. Bummer!). But besides that it's really late right now so it makes perfect sense to write something nice about one of my favourite rock songs of all time: Queen's "It's late"

The song "It's late" came off Queen's 1977 lp "News of the world", a wonderful album completely out of sync and yet full of songs that bare the marks of great craftsmanship, yet sometimes sound like complete parodies of what was hip at the time: punk. On "Shear heart attack" and "We will rock you" the band almost sounds like the Sex Pistols in drag. Then again, that should come as no surprise to anybody knowing Freddie Mercury who, when he first met Sid Vicious prompted a delicious "Ah, Mr. Ferocious, how are you?".

The whole album is much less polished than their previous ones, and "it's late" seems to summon up this new approach. 'The music builds up an impressive set of dynamics by contrasting verses that flow with a moody sense of swagger to a stomping chorus that balances its operatic quality with a gritty sense of punch' as allmusic puts it.

Queen: "It's Late"

Although "News of the World" was a hit at the time, it was the last of the epic Queen albums. What followed was a set of long players that gave the band a string of hits but never reached the artistic quality of those first six. Of course back in the seventies most music critics didn't like their music anyway because progressive rock bands were supposed to have a clear opinion on how the world could be turned into a happy clappy place. And with lyrics like "It's late - and I'm bleeding deep inside. It's late - is it just my sickly pride" Queen showed a lack of such a vision. But Freddie explained "we have nothing to say, but we say it so well".

And they did!