Magnum – The Valley of the tears – the Ballads

When is a new Magnum album not a new album?  When it’s their latest release, Valley of the Tears – The Ballads.  That little bit on the end tells you what this is, it’s a compilation album featuring some of the ballads from their long career.  It’s a nice idea – Magnum have got plenty of great ballads to choose from and collecting them together does make sense in that it will appeal to some fans.

Happily they haven’t done it the lazy way and just thrown together some existing recordings, but instead have re-recorded a couple of the songs, and the rest are remixed and remastered.  There’s also a new live version of one song (When the world comes down).

The big question is whether Magnum fans will be interested in this release – a lot of their fans will have all the albums so will have the original versions of these songs, so is it worth shelling out for these versions? To be honest there is very little here to appeal to the fans who have the earlier albums, but one big attraction in the new version of “Lonely night” which has been given a largely acoustic treatment and sounds absolutely fantastic.  Other than that there’s little here for their fans other than the convenience of having a collection of ballads on one album.  Hardcore fans will no doubt buy it, but beyond that I’m not convinced.

Great songs, but most fans will have the originals and I’m not convinced there is enough here to convince them to spend their cash.  If however you only have one or two Magnum albums then this is well worth considering.

Valley of the tears – The Ballads, will be released on 6th January 2016

Track listing:

1. Dream about you
2. Back in your arms again
3. The valey of the tears
4. Broken wheel
5. A face in the crowd
6. Your dreams won’t die
7. Lonely night
8. The last frontier
9. Putting things in place
10. When the world comes down.