The fifth studio album from Norwegian progressive hard rockers Magic Pie seems to have reached far beyond the Norseland region. The band has released several solid albums over the years, never getting their big break but always getting critical acclaim as well as a buzz in the “prog underground”.
After getting a solid write-up in Prog Magazine and some foreign festival gigs, including the Cruise To the Edge boat festival in the Caribbean Sea, their exposure is certainly getting better. Hopefully this is the album that can take them that one step further.
Magic Pie started as a pure progressive rock band, but over time they have combined this with melodic pop hooks as well as muscular 1970s styled hard rock. To that effect, they have established themselves as a classic vocals-guitar-keyboard-bass-drums band, and there is a similarity to bands like Kansas, Dream Theater, Spock’s Beard and the like – although Magic Pie have their own sound which is instantly recognisable.
The structure of this album says it all: five songs, with the last one being a 23-minute epic. Two full LP sides of music.
The band’s sound is immediately on display in album opener The Man Who Had It All, which is a muscular hard rocker with plenty of driving guitars and keyboards pushing the punchy song onward.
This energy is retained in next track P & C, although this track is more progressive. This is also where the lovely Uriah Heep-tinged layered vocals show up on the album. Eirikur Hauksson (vocals) is as usual amazing throughout.
Eirikur is well known from many previous projects in the Norselands, including Norwegian heavy metal band Artch (active from 1984-1992, with some reunions in the 2000s). They made one of the best metal albums of the 1980s some 35-ish years ago, and Hauksson was a big part of that. I am delighted that he is in a band of Magic Pie’s capacity today, singing better than ever.
Table For Two keeps the melodic hooks coming and features a particularly nice keyboard solo. Things get more emotional on Touched By An Angel, which is nothing less than a full-tilt blues rock ballad. Hauksson sings his heart out, and Stenberg drops some blazing guitar solos. The song feels a tad drawn out at eight minutes, but there’s no doubt it is competently performed.
The big finale is the 23-minute epic The Hedonist, which goes to show that no song is too long as long as it’s full of creativity and interesting writing. This is easily the best song on the album. This is Magic Pie at their best, with a well-written, wonderfully performed piece of imaginative, hook-laden, progressive hard rock.
The Hedonist is simply a delight to listen to. The song is very adventurous, going into several quite different passages, and it keeps being brought back home by that infectious chorus with the central melodic theme of the piece:
We find joy, we feel sorrow
No one knows what waits beyond tomorrow
The rich get richer, the poor stay poor
Only two ways down that corridor
Lyrically the song tackles several inconvenient truths about our society, while musically there are several instrumental passages painting their own story about this for effect. It reaches a climax with an epic battle between guitar & synth, with shades of the ‘battle’ in Uriah Heep’s classic and equally epic song The Magician’s Birthday (1972). It’s all summed up at the end: “Here in the street of dreams; You’ll find no in-betweens; It’s a dead-end; Or the wheel of fortune.”
Fragments of the 5th Element is a rock solid album from a band that is keen to establish themselves on the next level, and is just on the brink of achieving that. Here’s hoping they can get all the way. They certainly have the album to back up their bid.
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