A KIND OF MAGIC

Queen's legendary performance at "Live Aid" encouraged the band to return to the recording studios, and after two years of uncertainty about the band's continuity, they finally released "A Kind of Magic", their twelfth album, in 1986.

Best known for being the album that prompted what would end up being the band's last tour with Freddie Mercury and immortalised on 1992's "Live at Wembley", "A Kind of Magic" is made up of a handful of songs, many of which formed part of the soundtrack for the film "Highlander" and complemented by a few party rock songs, making up a hybrid mosaic that never quite came together as a unit.

The auspicious "One Vision", an energetic piece from start to finish, the festive and chanting rock of "Friends Will be Friends", the orchestrated and slightly cloying emotionality of "Who Wants to Live Forever" and the rocky forcefulness of "Princes of the Universe", the best track on the album by far, make up the album's most successful passages; and on the other hand, as a counterpart, the accessible "A Kind of Magic" of unthinkable vitality live, and tracks that do not fit in with the band's history and do not add much value, beyond the experimentations that Mercury was always so prone to, such as the soporific soul "One Year of Love" with sax included, "Pain is so Close to Pleasure" in Motown style, or the confused "Don't Lose Your Head".

Despite this unsynchronised duality, "A Kind of Magic" is a loveable album by Queen, who at that point in their career had already passed all the tests they had been subjected to for years, and hence its rating is always associated more with the emotional elements it generated than with an objective evaluation (if one can speak of objectivity in a matter of taste...).

2.5/3 stars