True Colours
“After Legend I was all for getting the Moog, the Taurus pedals and the Mellotrons out again.”
Received wisdom defines Magenta pithily. “Neo-prog, female singer,” Robert Reed laughs wryly. But over more than two decades, some of Magenta’s seven previous albums have undermined said received wisdom significantly, most notably 2017’s We Are Legend.
Complete with dystopian artwork, that album was arguably the most radical of Magenta’s career. It was a considerably more dense – and to some, comparatively impenetrable – release. By contrast the band’s new album, Masters Of Illusion, is a return to the sound for which Magenta are best known. It’s also very possibly their strongest ever release and a deliberate stylistic shift from We Are Legend.
Reed has previously openly acknowledged that he struggled with both confidence and creative inspiration leading up to … Legend, feeling that he’d exhausted Magenta musically. As a result, that album took Magenta in a decidedly different direction.
“I get really bored if I do one style all the time, I couldn’t find a way in. Eventually I thought we’d do something we hadn’t done before, which was embrace electronica sounds and loops and get a bit of a harder edge – stuff I’d avoided because I didn’t think it was us.”
