Rhino's streaming the entire thing here. I'm 2 minutes in, but it sounds surprisingly okay once the first actual song kicks in "I'm American." If you mixed the sound of Promised Land with the original Mindcrime, you get an idea of the sound. It probably isn't a classic, but it's not bad. (. . . yet?)

Its gets worse half way thru....unfort.

I'm American is the highlight of the album, and the only song that may have even been a b-side to the first record.

Yeah, I lost interest right about 30 minutes in, actually. I wasn't expecting much, so I'm not really all that let down.

Boy, those keyboards that were sprinkled throughout . . . what were they thinking? Very cheesy, Dream Theater-ish keys. And not Dream Theater-ish in a good way.

I was gonna go to that stream link & burn it...but now...maybe not.

If you do a search thru obner, i posted a full review for my mag, which i still stand by...

If you are a queensryche fan:
if you look operation mindcrime 2 as a seperate entity, its the best record they have done sinced 'promised land'.

if you look at it as the sequel (which it is), then its kind of dissapointing.

Got it yesterday. Impressions, based on Nothingface's points above:

As a Queensryche fan in general: I'd put it on par with Hear in the Now Frontier in that it has a number of good songs that I'd listen to again, but a lot of stuff I don't really care about at all. But I like what I like from HitNF much better than what I like about OM2, which isn't a very positive thing.

As a sequel: it's really not working. I don't even really get what the story is. It seems like a bunch of similarly themed songs bound together as an album, rather than an actual story like the original was. Most of all, it's a story that didn't need to be told.

This album illustrates what people hate about concept albums: it's plodding, self-absorbed, and unsatisfying. And silly. All things that the original was not. I feel almost no desire to listen to this again.

And the duet with Dio . . . oh my. It's really bad.