Dio - Magica

Concept albums are something of a divided beast, they are usually either excellent or horrible with little middle ground, and usually this is dependant largely on how good the concept is. If you have something like The Wall then the ideas are universal enough for everyone to relate to without the specific storyline needing to be all that important. Even Operation: Mindcrime, which has a pretty specific storyline, has themes with are vague enough for the audience to connect to. Here is a fantasy/sci-fi storyline about people who turn into stone or something. There’s also a love story in there. Dio talks you through it at the end of the album. It goes on for about 20 minutes and I’ve never listened to it all the way through because I kind of don’t care that much.

The music is alright I guess. When you have songs written around a storyline they have to point in one direction so the sequencing can ruin the flow of the album. That’s the ultimate problem with the record, it doesn’t flow. You’ve got about three short introductory themes, and then a few riff-driven rock songs, all of which sound pretty similar and to top it off the riffs aren’t really all that exciting. These are rock riffs, they don’t have to be technical but they DO have to be exciting. When they’re exciting the band is on a buzz and that comes across on the recording. Most importantly it puts the listener on a buzz. I must have listened to nothing but Children of the Grave for three weeks solid when I first heard that song. Here the music is largely filler to move from one exposition point to the next. The lyrics aren’t particularly good, but if it was at least exciting it wouldn’t matter. Take the track Killing the Dragon from Dio’s following album: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKcuPnkG-mM . These are lame lyrics that could be thrown together by just about anyone with a vague idea of what Dungeons and Dragons is about, far worse than anything on here. The chorus is grammatically borked. But it is a cool song. It’s exciting and it takes you on its corny Elvish adventure and you love every minute of it, all four and a half of them. Here it’s a lot harder to get as invested in what’s going on when you need to do the work to keep your interest up.


The best two tracks (that is, the two tracks I really like) are the power ballad As Long as it’s Not About Love and Losing My Insanity which was probably raided from a Jethro Tull demo reel. Everything else is pretty dispensable.

As Long as it’s Not About Love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR8RMdhOZeM
Losing My Insanity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfh7to0dmco