4. Magenta – We
Are Legend
2017 was the year of
progressive artists making their comeback after life-threatening
illnesses. Magenta's Christina Booth dryly described her brush with
cancer as “a bit of a bummer” and is eager to resume business as
usual after this minor setback. Still, whether by accident or design, Magenta's latest album
might be their darkest to date.
For Rob Reed and his merry band have made an album filled with tales of despair and dystopia, about robots as well as zombies taking over the world, and about the mental breakdown of
Vincent van Gogh. It's structured like a Yes album, with one big
show-stopping epic in the beginning, followed by two shorter (but
still long) pieces.
I might have been a
bit less than partial to Magenta-epics in the past – I feel they
work best in the mid-long range as on Seven and The Twenty
Seven Club – but I must admit to being very impressed with
“Trojan”. Where other long-form compositions didn't really gel
together for me, “Trojan” feels like a well-structured whole that
showcases the best qualities of every single featured musician.
The other two songs
are no slouch either. It's chilling when Christina with the
sugary-sweet pipes transforms into the terrifying zombie queen in the finale
to “Legend”. Although she shrugged off her cancer with her voice intact, there are no
happy endings on this album. Beautiful and relentless. They are,
indeed, legend.
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