Band:	Magnum
Album:	Here Comes The Rain
Style:	Progressive rock
Release date:	January 2024

01. Run Into The Shadows
02. Here Comes The Rain
03. Some Kind Of Treachery
04. After The Silence
05. Blue Tango
06. The Day He Lied
07. The Seventh Darkness
08. Broken City
09. I Wanna Live
10. Borderline

Magnum have reigned over their kingdom of madness for over 50 years now, and at long last it seems the rain has finally come; whether the band will continue remains to be seen at present, but the storm clouds that ushered in this album are a solemn marker for the passing of Tony Clarkin, the band's lead guitarist and co-founder. It was a shock seeing the news of Clarkin, whose illness had been publicized only very recently, and Magnum was working out how to accommodate him in the promotion of this release. The timing especially makes Here Comes The Rain a significant album in this band's long and admirable career.

I’ll try not to make this too elegiac, however, for there are better fans than me to carry out that duty, and when you devote such a vast quantity of your life to one passion like this, your music deserves to be appreciated on its own merits; after all, Magnum have been steady for decades, and they aimed to carry on for even longer, I reckon. For them, Here Comes The Rain was another step on the path, not the culmination, and there’s still the vigor and enthusiasm that they have always brought to their music.

Even without the added context, this album would have followed its name into bittersweetness, thanks to the humble lamentations and moody images populating these ten tracks: the melancholy synths of the title track, the wistful, ironically sunny orchestrations of “Some Kind Of Treachery”, and the lonely acoustic eulogy of “Broken City” capture Magnum in downtrodden elegance. It’s a longstanding strength of Magnum’s, to amble from pure poetry to pure power from song to song, and while there’s that perennial variety in songwriting on Here Comes The Rain, there’s a little more singularity in mood than I’m used to. That’s by no means a criticism – I find Magnum at their best when they’ve got a touch of darkness clouding their choruses, although, in spite of their well-established partiality to both power ballads and bouncing arena rock, I also tend to like when they’ve got a fire lit under their feet. It’s the fearful warnings of opener “Run Into The Shadows” and the heartbroken paces of “After The Silence” that make the strongest showings for me, and they manage some heaviness without clipping the sad spiral that culminates with “I Wanna Live”. That’s a song that no longer requires explication, regardless of its original motivations.

If you stack up these harder rock tracks against the last several albums – or any of them, really – it becomes most evident just how much energy Magnum have retained across so manyd decades. I think Bob Catley decided to age once – and it was just a little bit, 30 years ago, and he’s sounded the same ever since. Tony Clarkin’s riffs and solo work across the whole album are also as great as they ever were, and they have a touch more abrasion than usual, just a hint of rawness relative to other recent albums that, in spite of the typically grand production scale, helps advance the broadly crestfallen feeling of the whole piece. His playing features especially prominently on “Borderline”, another swinging rock number, which now seems like an appropriate way to close the album.

I don’t know Magnum well enough yet to feel that I could confidently place this in their discography, and I also feel like the minutiae of this album’s characteristics aren’t really the point right now: everybody is going to be listening to this album to hear one final hurrah from Tony Clarkin. Maybe this won’t be your favorite Magnum album, but I don’t think anyone will be disappointed with this. It has the the theatrical presence and melodic smoothness that make Magnum great, along with little hints of the classic prog and folk rock that they left behind ages ago but not absolutely, and thanks to typically energetic performances and a bevy of strong hooks, Here Comes The Rain is a great way to appreciate what Tony Clarkin and Magnum gave the world for so many years.

“After The Silence”:

So now it’s over
It couldn’t last
Won’t get much older
Lost in the past