Quote:
Originally Posted by jackhammer
^^
Quality write up there 
Magnum were unfashionable even in the 80's and never really got the balance right in terms of band imagery and direction.
Those magnificent Rodney Matthews album covers from the early 80's suggested an all out Prog band but Magnum were all about melody first and structure second but this ultimately was a hindrance for the band as they were so hard to market.
They produced many moments of what you term AOR but then they could make much longer songs with tempo changes both musically and stylistically and this is what most fans in the U.K remember them for.
The 1988 album Wings Of Heaven is a perfect example. It's an 8 track album with 5 tracks of insipid ballads or AOR inspired music but then we have Wild Swan, One Step Away and the superb 14+ min Don't Wake The Lion which are among some of the very best tracks they have ever done.
Such a frustrating band in that they were almost always forced by their various record companies to come up with radio friendly songs but unleashed from that the band really came into their own.
The memorable far outweighs the banal for me with The Spirit, The Prize, Soldier Of The Line, How Far Jerusalem and Kingdom Of Madness along with the aforementioned Wings Of Heaven tracks suggesting much more than just another AOR band. |
Their album covers were great and I always loved them. The
Chase the Dragon album came out about a year before the first Asia album, I mention Asia because on first glance you would expect them to be very similiar bands but Magnum always had a more depth than Asia, but it was Asia who became one of the biggest bands in the world at that time, with a far more basic sound. Again this is the perfect case of the band missing out there.
On the 1988 album you mentioned again it was bad timing, by this time all the really big and best AOR bands Toto, Journey, Survivor and Boston etc had long since put out their best material and were all in serious decline and by the late 80s AOR was in serious decline, in fact it never ever recovered. What took its place, were teams of songwriters such as people like Desmond Child, Todd Cerney and Diane Warren etc who were brought in to revitalize old popular acts such as Aerosmith, Cheap Trick and Pat Benatar etc and basically write hits for these bands, if you were an old AOR band or like one of the three artists mentioned above, you really needed to tow the line of the record comapnies and let these writers write some songs for you, once again Magnum probably stuck to their guns and refused this, and again missing out commercial wise.