Shane’s Music Challenge: QUEEN – 1986 – A Kind Of Magic

Shane | 20 February 2014 | Reply

Shane’s Music Challenge: QUEEN – 1986 – A Kind Of Magic
5/10

Queen have the distinction of being my second favourite band. Not my second all-time favourite, mind you – I mean that after a few years in thrall to The Beatles, Queen overtook them as my favourite band for maybe 2 years (next up was Iron Maiden, which shows a pretty steep escalation in hindsight), through my late school years.

By the time they released this – sort of the soundtrack to the movie Highlander – I was far more fixated on heavy metal and much of the synth- and ballad-heavy material here did not resonate with the 20 year old me at all.

Listening again now, there is some okay material – One Vision is as ambitious as A Kind Of Magic is infectious, and Who Wants To Live Forever is a strong ballad, but much of the rest merely pastiches their older material into little boxes – this one is a harmony-laden ballad, this one a rocker, this one a power ballad with a chance for Brian May to show off his 6 string dexterity.

A Kind Of Magic was probably the last Queen album I liked – and I didn’t like it much at the time, at all. As the band wound down into a quieter middle age, it was a case of ‘thanks for the truly groundbreaking stuff – I’ve used that as a stepping stone to more relevant things for me.’