MAGENTALANE

Trust a bunch of prog-addled nerds to dislike this album. Anyone giving it a low score approached it with the completely wrong mindset. The strength of this band was always the way they managed to marry the pop sensibilities of the Beatles to the spacey leanings of ELO and the absolute perfect example of that can be found in the very first track of this album. Magentalane is a lot more Beatles than some of their previous albums but it's also their best album. If I had reviewed this album after a single listen, I might have given it four stars, because I recall that there were originally one or two places that I thought sounded uninspired. But after having become familiar with the band and having listened to their work many more times since then, I've come to think of this as a near-perfect album. There are weaknesses, but it was a human band, not a Politzanian one.