Style: Progressive rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Deep Purple, Yes, The Flower Kings, Kansas, Spock’s Beard
Country: Norway
Release date: 16 May 2025
To meaningfully assess a modern progressive rock band, one must first embrace the act of judgment—a process I’ve long since systematized. In the incomprehensibly vast progressive musical landscape of the year 2025, whether they know it or not, all prog rock bands that come across my desk are being judged. While this may sound harsh, it’s more of a complex calculation than it is an exercise in caviling, with all bands landing somewhere on a three-dimensional vector graph in my mind: the X axis measures how technically proficient the band is; the Y axis measures their creativity and originality; and Z is for how seriously they take themselves. While I am not prepared to misappropriate my professional Microsoft Visio license to create a full diagram of how various well-known prog rock acts slot onto the plane, this graph is foundational to my assessment and appreciation of bands in the genre. And there’s certainly an optimal zone when it comes to seriousness: the more unabashedly zany or tongue-in-cheek a band is (think Cheeto’s Magazine), the greater creativity and technical prowess I expect in order for them to establish a foothold in a favourable quadrant. Conversely, many titans of the prog rock scene (Jethro Tull, Transatlantic, etc.) engage in a degree of navel-gazing pretension which cannot, in my eyes, be redeemed, even by their beefy musical chops.
So, do Norway’s Magic Pie land in the sweet spot? One could reasonably assume that the band’s name belies a lack of seriousness. But these seasoned rockers have a deft hand with the ingredients on their latest record Maestro. The goofiness is not mixed in too liberally; rather, the prevailing flavour is a hearty, feel-good seventies-inspired prog in the vein of Flower Kings or Steve Hackett, with dashes of Kansas– or Queen-like vocal harmonization, and a few heavier spikes of Dream Theater dashed in.
Almost all of Magic Pie’s previous albums have featured a long epic track, and Maestro is no exception. Does the rather prolixly-titled opening track, “Opus Imperfectus Pt.1 – The Missing Chord” need to be eighteen minutes long? Certainly not, but Magic Pie are enjoying themselves throughout. The free-flowing, unhurried compositional structure sees the band ramble through a symphonic intro, mellotron-infused retro shine, and amply proportioned, meandering solos. It’s less a circle-jerk and more of a jovial fun time, calling to mind some of the stream of consciousness unwinding of Deep Purple or Dire Straits’ live acts. Maestro‘s fun, catchy verve is perfectly captured in the track’s unhurried, anthemic chorus, which slides into a catchy modulated phrase as the backing vocals build a sort of intoxicating thrall.
But not all of Maestro unfolds with such buoyant charm. As a follow-up to “Opus Imperfectus”, the ballad “By the Smokers Pole” is a down-tempo snooze, and this is where Magic Pie’s pacing issue comes into the foreground. There’s certainly fun to be had in the space between the two-part “Opus” that bookends Maestro, as in the straightforward rockin’ opening of “Somebody Else’s Wannabe” that blooms into a rhythmically fleet-footed proggy jaunt. Dedicating so much space to the opening and closing tracks, however, leaves the five tracks in the middle shuffling to find a place to stand; some more successfully than others. The two-minute “Kiddo…”, for example, has no footing at all, stuck in some no man’s land between an interlude and a full song.
Vocally, Icelander Eirikur Hauksson never really stuns. While he flashes some zany theatricality across the album, calling to mind the gusto of David Bowie or Freddie Mercury, his delivery prevailingly rests in an unremarkable mid-range comfort zone marked by a loose vibrato—capable if a little cut-and-dried, though the plush backing vocals do some work to infuse more flavour. By comparison, the instrumental deliveries are punchier, and easily shoot Magic Pie up my technical proficiency axis: the guitars and keys tumble and cavort around each other, cascading into long, careening solos that weave together everything from bluesy twang to spacey prog-metal shimmer, as the bass and drums knit a tight groove underneath.
Conceptually, I lose Maestro’s lyrical thread somewhere in between the Maestro jumping into the ocean in the first track, and Hauksson opining about the proliferation of social media in “Kiddo…” While “tortured virtuoso struggles to compose his magnum opus” seems like a premise spit straight out of Prog Rock Idea Generator Dot Com1, and it certainly isn’t scoring the band any gains on my originality/creativity axis, the concept is so light-handed as to be virtually untraceable across the album’s forty-nine minutes. This is just as well with me, albeit probably not in line with Magic Pie’s intention.
Maestro may not push boundaries, nor does it fully transcend the gravitational pull of its own “epic” opening. But with a high technical coefficient and just enough self-awareness to avoid tumbling into the black hole of prog pretension, Magic Pie chart a respectable course through the vector space. For all its uneven pacing and conceptual fuzziness, if you’re looking for a warm, comforting slice of prog rock that’s easy on the palate, Magic Pie’s Maestro is worth digging into.
Recommended tracks: Opus Imperfectus Pt. 1 – The Missing Chord, Somebody Else’s Wannabe
You may also like: Moon Safari, Southern Empire, The Twenty Committee, The Cryptex
Final verdict: 6.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Karisma Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Magic Pie is:
– Kim Stenberg (guitar)
– Eirikur Hauksson (vocals)
– Erling Henanger (keyboard)
– Lars Petter Holstad (bass)
– Martin Utby (drums)
- Whether or not this is a real website is left up to your imagination, dear reader ↩︎
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