Magic Review

This is the late period album that most rewards attention, because the trick from 1984 is redeployed with more finesse. The surfaces are sunny: chiming twelve string, a string section, harmonies, hooks arriving where you expect them. Underneath, Livin' in the Future is about waking up in a country you no longer recognise, Last to Die takes a line from a young man's congressional testimony about a war and applies it to a new one, and Devil's Arcade is a soldier in a hospital bed.

The title track is a stage magician explaining that the trick works because you want to believe it, which is about as blunt as he gets. Radio Nowhere opens with a great riff and is the weakest idea here. The production is clean and slightly compressed in the way of its decade. What lifts it is the writing, which is sharper and angrier than anything he had done since the eighties, and the band, which sounds like a band again rather than a reunion.