A KIND OF MAGIC

A Kind of Magic ? 1986 (1.6/5) Nearly one star. 7 ? Best Song: Pain is so Close to Pleasure Ohh boy, what a shit! Magic? Yeah, it'd take a fucking mystical wizard to come up with something as mindboggling and terrible as this album. Ugh, I hate being so rough when Works was so solid, but this is a dip, the big dip, too. It's a bigger dip than from Day to News, and that's saying quite a lot. What's wrong with it? It might as well not even be a Queen record. It sounds half like the Temptations, half like Elton John's 1980's crap, and I'll throw it in there and say the electronic recording techniques sucked the life out of everthing. I can't hum a single line, and the melodies suck ass. It's much worse than Pink Floyd's biggest gaffes in the 1980's (mainly just Momentary Lapse of Reason), which showcases both bands as meagerly paying tribute to their former selves. 'Pain is so Close to Pleasure' is the only immediately accessible song on here that doesn't make you go screaming out of the room in a heated panic. I thought at the very least they'd hit me with something memorable or stadium-ready, but it's more along the lines of thin adult contemporary and new-soul. The overpowering synth washes are a predominate mark of the album as well, like the opening and background to the vilely slow 'Who Wants to Live Forever', and the songs are anemically empty. What a disgrace, friends.