A Strange Inheritance - Nick Magnus's new album reviewed by Alan Hewitt

Avast ye lubbers! Cap’n Magnus’s new opus be upon us! Oops, sorry for the lapse into “Pirate” there for a moment, don't know what came over me! But yeah, verily and forsooth, Mr Magnus’s new album is now available and what a little beauty it is.

A Strange Inheritance indeed, a dramatic tale that takes us back to the golden age of pirates…the tale is laced with many twists and turns and what begins with An Almost Silent Witness a brilliant twist as the “witness” is none other than the parrot whose preserved body is part of the inheritance - a legacy of treachery, bloodshed, love and loss all seen through the bird’s eyes - what an unexpected start!

Blood Money is a superbly evocative depiction of the arrival of Europeans in the Terrae Incognita of the New World, their arrival greeted as the arrival of gods. The wonder is soon replaced by hatred and resentment as "...your gains were our losses…you took our silver, you took our gold/And you gave us wooden crosses…” The region which soon became the infamous Spanish Main, haunt of pirates and the ancestral home of great empires all brought low.

Philadelphia, a strange name for a girl and one whose life was destined to be a mixture of love and loss. Seduced and abandoned by her lover and eventually forced to leave her child to the tender mercies of the Coram Field orphanage, her only bequest: a walnut shell broken in half.

We then find ourselves At Sea At Night, the sea of life perhaps? A dream? A nightmare, vividly drawn from the finest musical components.

Four Winds, the album’s sole instrumental depicts the winds which were supposed to be from the four corners of the earth. Here we have an almost tone poem like description of them beginning with Boreas, the ferocious North Wind raging chorus and music vividly describe this most feared of the four Winds. Notus, the South Wind, ethereal and mysterious like the fogs and sea mists that enshroud sailors whilst Eurus, the East wind and Zephyrus,the West Wind contrasting sadness and the exuberance of youth all superbly depicted in truly timeless music.

The winds of time or fate bid us Welcome To The Island, not your average island though, oh no, this is a place of primordial magic and mystery, where reality meets magic and it is hard to see where one begins and the other begins.

Our “almost silent witness” tells the tale of Black And Scarlet, the tale of piracy and it's consequences as our heroine “Philadelphia” becomes queen of the buccaneers.

The flotsam and jetsam of time were contained in that chest and bequeathed To Whom It May Concern (humanity) in the hope that lessons may be learned.

A morality tale, an evocation of a “Golden Age” mired in blood and betrayal what we have here is storytelling as high art. Each moment picked out in shining detail brought vividly to life by Nick and his compatriots including stunning vocal performances from Louise Young, Andy Neve, Ginger Bennett and Tony Patterson alongside some superb electric and acoustic stick guitar work from John Greenwood the end result is a truly wonderful album.