I’ve had a long day and I’m ready
to have a new album, so let’s get to this.
The CD Odyssey continues, as I randomly work my way through my whole
damned music collection. Here is the
latest leg of the journey.
Disc 572 is…. The Magician’s Birthday
Artist: Uriah
Heep
Year of Release: 1972
What’s up with the Cover? A ‘kind of’ naked magician (although he may be wearing
socks; it’s unclear) prepares to do battle with some kind of monochrome Landscape
Demon. If you know the album you’ll know
the magician’s most powerful spell is ‘an impenetrable fortress of love’, which
might explain the flower girl in the centre left of the painting. I find this cover delightfully ridiculous,
kind of like Uriah Heep’s music.
How I Came To Know It: My friend Spence put me on to the band via the album
“Demons and Wizards” (reviewed back at Disc 310). I bought “The Magician’s Birthday because it
came out the same year, and so I expected it would have a similar sound.
How It Stacks Up: I only have two Uriah Heep albums. Of the two, “Demons and Wizards is the better
record.
Rating: 2 stars but almost 3
Listening to this album was a
reminder that perceiving time as divided by decades is an arbitrary mental
trick we play on ourselves. Just like a
computer, our mind needs things parceled up into smaller, more manageable bits and
we use ideas like ‘the sixties’ or ‘the seventies’ to help accomplish that for
all kinds of things like political eras, movies and yes, music. I even do it on the sidebar of this very
blog.
“The Magician’s Birthday” definitely
includes a lot to what we think of as seventies music, including pounding riffs
and the soaring vocals that later in the decade would give way to metal. However, the songs have more in common with
sixties progressive rock than anything else.
The music ambles around those riffs quite a lot, and the almost spoken
word style of vocalist David Byron are very much rooted in the hippie scene of
the late sixties.
Musically, the record has its
moments, particularly the driving guitar and high pitched vocal wailing that
launches the track “Sunshine.” If the band was trying to capture the power
of the morning sun newly breaking on the ground (and I think they were) they
succeed admirably.
Unfortunately a lot of the time,
the band is more focused on coming up with clever ideas than keeping a song
consistently powerful. The next track, “Spider Woman” has a very promising
beginning in a similar vein to “Sunshine”
(minus the high vocals) but halfway in the band lets the song descend into a
muddy guitar solo that sounds more like the band jamming than a completed
song. It is a song that is either
over-written or not finished, and it’s hard to tell which. It is too bad, because the guitar riff in the
chorus is sublime.
The lyrics on this record are
truly ridiculous. Sometimes they are
tolerable, particularly when the band wraps themselves in silly fantasy, like
these from “Tales”:
“No thought of sleep ever dwells upon
The wise man’s mind
Some task or audience stealing every
Moment of his time.”
But often when they try to get
serious it only makes it worse. From “Rain”:
“It’s raining outside but that’s not unusual
But the way that I’m feeling is become usual.”
Wow. Sometimes it rains and it is not unusual. In fact it is…usual. Painfully bad and more aggravating by the
fact that the melody he sings them with would ordinarily be quite pretty, but I
can’t get past just how bad that is.
Later the rain becomes symbolic of his tears, because – metaphor!
The album does have one classic
rock song on it, “Sweet Lorraine.” It
starts with a crazed organ that sounds like an alien ray gun going off,
tripping straight into a tiny slice of funky guitar that Bootsy Collins would
be proud of. Then it switches gears
again, launching into a hard rock earworm, as Byron invites his girl Lorraine
to take a magic potion with him and head out on a trip to his cosmic
playground. Here I don’t think any metaphor is intended. Even the drumming on this track is
killer. Near the end, the ray gun organ returns,
but this time it is slowed down and in a minor key and sounds more like the
music you hear as you enter Dracula’s castle in a Hammer film. All of this is
accomplished in a brisk 4:15.
In the end, I had to choose
between giving this album three stars for its musicianship and bravery (and “Sweet Lorraine”) or knock it down to
only two stars on account of its lack of direction and God-awful lyrics. In the end, I decided to let the title track
decide the matter – all ten plus progressive minutes of it.
The song, “The Magician’s Birthday,” starts with all the promise of “Sunshine,” a half-funky, half-rock riff
as they sing about some weird magician character and his birthday party. The party is “in the forest, but not so far away” so that was promising. I found myself hoping there would be cake and
fireworks.
Instead, a minute and a half in the
song descends into a kazoo solo (yes, the kazoo), with a chorus singing “Happy Birthday” to the magician. That goes
on for about a minute before returning to a proggy section that sounds like the
guitar player and the drummer were fighting about who should do something
next. The guitar eventually wins, and
proceeds to lay down the most aimless ambling four minute guitar solo I’d heard
in some time.
The song ends with a duel between
some evil wizard (who I assume was not invited to the party, and showed up out
of spite) and our hero the magician. The
evil one sends the magician fire and nightmares, but our hero turns it into a
stream and dreams. The magician triumphs
with the aforementioned ‘impenetrable
fortress of love.’ The song then
ends with some strange falsetto singing.
The pretty riff at the beginning never returns. Also, at no point is there cake. Worst. Party. Ever.
For “Sweet Lorraine” alone, I enjoy this record, and it has some other
good spots as well, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you really dig
progressive sixties and seventies rock.
I do dig them, but progressive music needs more direction than this to
work. As for the title track, if you
want a good song about battling wizards, I recommend Rush’s “The Necromancer” off the excellent album
“Caress of Steel” which is longer, proggier, and yet at no point features
the kazoo.
Best tracks: Sunrise,
Sweet Lorraine.
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