Often Formulaic, Overbearing Metal From Queensryche

When is a heavy metal concert like a big Sunday brunch?

When it’s halfway through 1997 and nobody except Metallica really knows what heavy metal means anymore (and purists would even dispute that), and the band playing is Queensryche (which always seemed like an exception to the heavy metal rules), and its set is a two-hour banquet table laden with a little of this and a little of that, some of it identifiably heavy and metal and some not.

The half-capacity house at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on Wednesday wasn’t choosy, heartily wolfing down most of what the veteran band from Bellevue, Wash., laid out. Want a slab of red meat? Help yourself to a shout-along pounder. An airy souffle is more to your taste? Spoon down some “Silent Lucidity,” the gauzy prog-rockish ballad that was a big hit six years ago on MTV.

Got a sweet tooth? “Another Rainy Night (Without You)” was one of several cookies whipped from the same batter as any number of empty-calorie confections by Bon Jovi, Poison or Def Leppard. Nutrition minded? About a quarter of the concert was given over to “Operation: Mindcrime,” an operatic-metal concept album from 1988 that cemented Queensryche’s reputation for playing metal for the mind as opposed to the groin.

As for our chefs’ latest concoction, they saved room for a hunk of their new album, “Hear in the Now Frontier.” It isn’t a heavy metal record at all but a typically late-’90s melange of flavors, including hard rock, pop and psychedelia. Overall, this smorgasbord show was sometimes tasty but more often formulaic and overbearing. It proved that, in heavy metal as in other pop strains at the end of the millennium, the center cannot hold. Bagel, anyone?