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Ok, I still haven't received my official copy yet, but I've burnt my brother's copy onto my hard drive and thence onto minidisc, and have been listening to it over and over since last Thursday (WHERE'S MY CD, YOU BASTARDING BASTARDS ETC)... and it's gorgeous. With a few mild niggles. Here's Jack's Bodiless Review on the album he's been waiting over two years for...
There's a definite melancholy lyrical bent to this album, one of alienation, self-imposed isolation or voluntary seclusion. It begins with 'The Invisible Man', one of three much longer songs which hark back to their progressive roots in having several movements over the course of ten, twelve, eighteen minutes. 'The Invisible Man' begins with a detuned, low dark rumbling groove, bass and effects sounding almost like a Nine Inch Nails song, before moving into the song proper, which lyrically appears to move through the feeling of helplessness and remove coming from living in the internet age, able to practically eavesdrop on events occurring thousands of miles away, and feeling utterly helpless to make a difference in any of it (which anyone who's been on an anti-war demo in the last year or so can certainly relate to). It's probably the only song Marillion have recorded whose music, tonally, harks back to the Pink Floyd of Dark Side Of The Moon, and it's very affecting, the lyric by turns despairing of the alienating feeling of being invisible/intangible ("I stand perfectly still in the middle of the road... hold my nerve... hold my nerve... but the cars don't swerve...") and the fact that nothing the narrator can do affects anything ("I will walk stride for stride with you/I will try to help/When you stumble/You will stumble through me").
The 'Marbles' interludes (four of them scattered throughout the album, each less than two minutes long) are typically fey, scattered lyrics about losing marbles, both
whimsically metaphorical ("as I lie in my bed, there's a space in my head where there used to be colours and sound") and whimsically autobiographical (Steve playing marbles at school, hitting them in the air with a tennis racket, trying to keep as many as possible after they're confiscated, noticing that over the years as he grew up he's lost those precious things, one by one).
The first pop song, 'Genie', is a revelation - an irresistable hook. Lyrically dealing with a terrifying fear of taking some enormous step, or of expressing something that could be lifechanging, it's a gorgeously uplifting pop tune, which although a guitar-based song feels electronic in an expansively organic, melodic way. It's just brilliant songwriting, formulaic while somehow... not, and one of the finest pure pop songs they've ever written.
'Fantastic Place' is absolutely stunning. A slow dynamic build over the whole six minutes or so, the aching melody still managing to wrong-foot you part-way through, lyrically it seems to represent a wish to escape, to leave your life, your relationship, to live in a dream, a fantastic place ("Take me to the island/I'll watch the rain over your shoulder/The streetlights in the water/The moment outside of real life") - there's the sense that the narrator is trying to explain the lost feeling he has, knowing his partner won't ever truly understand. It's utterly beautiful, harking back to the title track of the 'Afraid Of Sunlight' album, and it's gonna be huge live.
'The Only Unforgiveable Thing' is an odd one, but a definite charmer. The first of several songs on the album that sound like they owe a little to The Flaming Lips at first, it moves into a building, soaring emotionally dynamic movement, before dropping back into the same chiming slow groove that began the song. A grower, but very rewarding.
Next is the big one, 'Ocean Cloud'. In many ways this could be seen to be vintage Marillion, but here the familar soaring, desperately melancholic melody is stretched out over eighteen minutes. What's astonishing,then, is that it feels like seven minutes, and that it carries the emotional dynamic over the entire length of the song without losing anything of its power. Nothing is rushed, through minutes of ambience, a sudden flurry of harsh, cutting guitar, before a return to the tune and the chorus again, and again... it feels like a short film inside your head, the expanse of the ocean spread before you, just as it is for the song's fleeing narrator. The lyric is bitterness, desolation, about the decision to leave a painful past behind, drift on the ocean forever, always looking back, never able to step out of the past even in the moment of escape.
'The Damage' is a return to some of the lyrics in 'Genie', a rattling, rolling kickstart of a song, vocals and guitars crashing around like they're drunk - it's the tongue-in-cheek consequences of getting the genie out of the bottle, the act he was so scared of in 'Genie', and it's a fantastic rock number that I can only really describe as the Kink's 'Lola' on a tequila bender. Classic.
'Don't Hurt Yourself' is alt.country pop, slide and acoustic guitars evoking a more cheerful Counting Crows or a less affected REM - it's a typically positive Steve Hogarth pop lyric about healing through radical, empowering redesign of the way you attack your life. The little hippy. Find a better way of life, indeed... 
'You're Gone' I've already described on the thread for the single - again, it's a gorgeous cross between U2's 'Electrical Storm' and Massive Attack's 'Hymn Of The Big Wheel'. Well deserved number seven hit, lads...
'Angelina' is, conceptually at least, another odd one, a soft, dreamy, beautiful melody caught within a song about a crush on the titular graveyard shift radio DJ. The gorgeous music seems in direct contrast to the tongue-in-cheek lyric ("Something wicked, something bad/Something for your mum and dad/Don't get even, Don't get mad/Get off on Angelina/Lonely man's best friend"), and no, I haven't figured it out yet... but knowing Steve Hogarth's impish sense of humour, the above's probably the whole point.
'Drilling Holes' is, again, another odd one, and I've got to confess that I don't like it. It's reminiscent of the feel of a lot of the Beatles' 'White Album', and it's not my cup of tea, to be honest. I don't get the lyric at all, and I kind find a hook to hang my hat on. There's always one...
Which leaves us with 'Neverland, a twelve minute, slightly unfocused, but moving paean to a lover, the gorgeous lyrical hook ("At times like these/Any fool can see/Any fool can see/Your love inside me") moving the song along. It's perhaps a little too long, to be honest - it could have been edited without losing anything - but it's still a lovely, achingly moving song, the kind that Marillion have perfected over the last fifteen years, and perfect to end an album this good on.
The only real niggle for me, aside from the fact that I just don't get 'Drilling Holes', is the track listing for the single CD release - the one available in stores. Obviously to release it like that means that some songs have to go - the double CD proper is still available by ordering from their online store - but one questions why they decided to leave off 'Genie', 'The Damage' and 'The Only Unforgiveable Thing' ('Ocean Cloud', at the length it is, isn't as surprising) - all of which are wonderfully charming and idiosyncratic tunes that show off today's Marillion wonderfully. 'Genie', in particular, would make a genius second single, which isn't possible now unless they make it an EP with the above two and 'Faith' (a track that didn't make the album), or something along those lines. My own choice would have been to leave 'Drilling Holes', 'Ocean Cloud' and 'Neverland' off the retail version, and rearrange the tracklisting, starting it off with the first 'Marbles' fragment, and leaving the album on a massive high with 'The Invisible Man'...
But this album is magnificent. So looking forward to seeing them on tour in July... |
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