04-08-1993 – Orange County Register – Los Angeles, CA
After years of writing about killer queens, world champions and a crazy little thing called love, Brian May has turned to a new genre _ writing about himself and how he feels.
His inexperience shows.
With clumsy but earnest cliches such as “I’m a shadow of the man I used to be,” listening to May’s new songs on the “Back to the Light” album is like listening to a babbling 17-year-old in love for the first time. You acknowledge the sincerity and depth of feeling, but you’re also kind of embarrassed for someone discovering fundamental truths that hit most of us in the face long ago.
Even if the lyrics are limp, May certainly feels them to his soul. At the final show of his first solo US tour, May threw himself into the material but stacked the deck by seeding his set heavily with songs from a band he used to play with.
May made a stunning entrance, but the cost was shooting off his three strongest guns in the first 15 minutes of the 1-hour 35-minute set. Opening with the upbeat “Back To the Light” from his solo album, May went into a frenzy of guitar solos while drummer Cozy Powell beat the daylights out of a canyon of Yamaha drums.
He followed with his European hit “Driven By You” and quickly dug into the Queen catalog with an over-the-top version of “Tie Your Mother Down.”
May performed his Queen compositions “We Will Rock You” and ” ’39” and also songs that were almost solely owned by the late Freddie Mercury, including “Love of My Life.” May managed to walk the line, embracing his past without exploiting it. This was fine with all the old Queen fans in the audience _ and we’re talking OLD Queen fans.
For all the guitar-solo firepower, it was “Love of My Life” that featured the most impressive work. May simply sat down alone with an acoustic guitar to fingerpick the tune. An utterly unforced sing-along made it a transcendent moment in a concert that had few.
It should tell May something that the song that worked best was the one that was the most stripped down. For the rest of the show, the Queen overkill was there, from billowing smoke to lush harmonies to a verse of “Bohemian Rhapsody” thrown into an interminable “Sheer Heart Attack.”
It was during that part of the set that May lost momentum. He plays great guitar, but 10 minutes of noodling alone on an electric guitar can be a rally-killer for anyone. It was followed by an extended drum solo by Powell, complete with strobe light. Wasn’t this stuff outlawed in 1978 or so?
Queen overkill slopped into May’s solo work, including the emotionally overwrought “Too Much Love Will Kill You.”
“They sound just alike,” one fan remarked of Mercury’s and May’s voices. His solo work and concert turns revealed that May was likely much more of an architect of Queen’s vocal sound than many fans previously suspected.