Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Kerrang! | |
| People Weekly | (unfavorable) |
| Rolling Stone | (unfavorable) |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| The Times | (mixed) |
Critical reaction to A Kind of Magic was mixed. Rolling Stone described the album as "heavy plastic", concluding, "This band might as well put some pomp back in its rock. Its members are never going to make it as dignified elder statesmen." The Times described the album as one of "the most spectacularly successful releases this year", yet questioned its appeal, asking, "why does it not extend to those of us who are given the records to review?" People Weekly wrote, "There's hardly a personal expression, let alone an intimate one, in this album... The group can be dazzling. In this case they're just overbearing." In a retrospective review, Allmusic were more favourable, writing, "It may not have been as cohesive as some of their other albums, but A Kind of Magic was their best work in some time." Kerrang! reviewer wonders "how much of the album is the 'real' Queen and how much is the result of the costraints/musical slant imposed upon them by writing material to go with a movie", concluding that "only a band of Queen's stature (...) could put out an album of such diverse songs without disappointing a sizeable portion of their fans".
In the 1994 edition of The Guinness All Time Top 1000 Albums, A Kind of Magic was voted #171 in the all-time greatest rock and pop albums. In 2006, a national BBC poll saw the album voted the 42nd greatest album of all time. In 2007, Classic Rock ranked A Kind of Magic the 28th greatest soundtrack album of all time.
Read more about this topic: A Kind Of Magic
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)