Kingdoms of Magical Rock

Kingdoms of Magical Rock, released on 7 June 2024, is a twenty-two song, seventy-minute covers set. Where the previous year's The Most Magical Album on Earth stayed inside Disney, this one widens the frame: "The Greatest Show" and "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman, "Deliver Us" and "The Plagues" from DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt, and "Kung Fu Fighting" all sit on the same shelf. There is one guest, Matthew K. Heafy of Trivium, on the metal version of "Into the Unknown." The track count needs reading carefully again. "Into the Unknown" appears twice among the twenty-two — the Heafy metal version at four, the ordinary one at twenty-two. What is really here is twenty-one songs and one reworking, exactly the structure of Skalds of Metal. This is a habit: he puts alternate takes of a song on the same record, and reading the track count as a song count will be wrong every time. The run from "Hellfire" through "Heigh-Ho," "Surface Pressure," "Poor Unfortunate Souls" and "Gaston" is also the sound of his clouded low register painting over the brightness of the originals, one after another.