MAGNUM
The Visitation
SPV

The differentiation between The Visitation and previous swellegant and clockwork-arriving Magnum offerings, amusingly, wafts more from the album cover than the music enclosed. Which is perfectly AOR-OK by me, Tony Clarkin and his Magnums long having perfected their enchanting hybrid of prog rock and pomp rock, creating a spiritual world of passionate, urgent melody carved and driven hard by guitars, pulled back and glossed up by inventive keyboards. I'm not feeling tracks leap out at me the way "Feels Like Treason" kicked me around the emotional block on '09's Into The Valley Of The Moonking, but there's a general and uniform bluster to the tracks that mathematically add up to a similar yearning as that classic album of shiny jewels afforded. In fact, there's almost a song-to-song match-up one could make from this to that record. Like I say though, when a band has grown their franchise organically over more than 30 years to arrive at a sound that is both singularly theirs and this happiness-generating, a second (or third) batch of the same is both comforting and welcome.
Rating 8