a b Popoff, Martin (October 2003). The Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal: Volume 1: The Seventies. Burlington, Ontario, Canada: Collector's Guide Publishing. p.302. ISBN 978-1894959025. The problem , is for the first time, there are BAD songs and inconsequential tunes that drown the album a little bit.( more to The original vinyl release was a gatefold sleeve, the front designed again by Roger Dean. The inner fold had pictures of the band, with the album itself housed in a liner on which were printed the lyrics. Worth it if you were bowled over by Demons and Wizards and don't mind that the artwork manages to be closer to the spirit of that album than the music a lot of the time, but The Magician's Birthday marks the waning of Heep's classic period in my view. If you believe what you read in Circus (and I do, I do!!) Uriah Heep organist Ken Hensley's original plan for this album called for a total concept opera-like work about a five-hundered-year-old magician who hosts a birthday party to which he invites all of his supernatural acquaintances. But Ken's fellow group members were less than thrilled by the project and talked him into limitng his contribution to just five songs.

advantage of the opportunity.....much to my chagrin as i think it was just a way to fill up the time allowed to fill up an LP and magician completing his 500th anniversary. The rest of the band was against it, claiming they should also Having heard those five songs, I can only say that I wish they'd been more persuasive in getting him to scrap the whole thing. Not that their own song gifts prove particularly scintillating but at least we'd have been spared lyrics like: "Weaker than a moment/Hot as any fire/Blinder than the blind eye/This is man's desire." C'mon guys! Adding to the general chaos is Dave Byron, who handles the lead vocal chores with all the subtlety of a trip-hammer operator, proving once again that breathless intensity makes a poor substitue for true interpretive capability.

Last note: another great cover from master ROGER DEAN, the last one until 1997' ''Sea of Light''. But by then, was a long time

the peak of the band, both in terms of songwriting and perfomance. It is only ironic that such masterpiece Though undeniably a pleasant listen, Uriah Heep's The Magician's Birthday doesn't quite measure up to the high standards of the run of albums leading up to it. The soaring, fantastic atmosphere of Demons and Wizards occasionally peeps in here and there, which saves the album from total mediocrity, but the glorious heights reached on that album are nowhere to be seen here. Simply put, doesn't really have any truly memorable standout songs that remain with you after listening - something every Heep album from Salisbury to Demons and Wizards offered in spades. Simply put, I could listen intently to the album and then an hour later I couldn't remember what most of the songs sound like aside from Sweet Lorraine - something which certainly isn't true of Salisbury or Demons and Wizards.

For the most part the production of The Magician's Birthday can be described as overblown... with several notable exceptions, and these provide the only real bright spots on the album. "Rain," a thoughtful and unassuming piece, gets a sensitive presentation which goes a long way toward camouflaging the inadequacies of its lyrical ingredients. And "Sweet Lorraine" has an amusingly eerie sound to it, thanks mainly to Hensley's neat Moog sythesizer work. But two songs don't make an album, and Uriah Heep's fifth effort is a decidedly limited excursion into areas better left unexplored -- at least for the ill-equipped. To the band's credit, it wasn't really their fault that their fifth album, 'The Magician's Birthday' Don't get me wrong: there are some excellent parts as well. Who doesn't like the beauty of ''Echoes in the dark'' and this Blind Eye and Sweet Lorraine. In fact, the whole album works very well and the only song that seems out