Reviewer's Note: The version of the album I'm reviewing is the double album that's only available direct from the band's website, www.marillion.com. The version available by normal retail outlets is a single album, with four songs missing.
Ever since "Script for a Jesters Tear" many, many years ago, the release of a new Marillion album has been an eagerly awaited event for me. I've followed them through the trauma of having to replace their charismatic original frontman, through the lows of "Holidays in Eden" and "Dotcom" to the highs of "Brave" and "Anoraknophobia". Since I've found their best work takes quite a few listens before you can really appreciate them, I've left it a couple of weeks before attempting to review it. After all, if the band too more than two years to write and record it, surely I can spend a couple of weeks listening to it?
Marillion have never been a band to stick with a successful formula. It's said that each album is a reaction to the one before; after the commercial "Holidays in Eden" came the complex, dark and intense "Brave", in turn followed by the mellow and reflective "Afraid of Sunlight". I felt the last release, "Anoraknophobia" was a major return to form following a couple of disappointing releases. Others felt it was too much a departure from their traditional sound, and their were some vicious flamewars on one mailing list between those that loved the new album with its use of drum loop and dub rhythms, and those that hated it.
"Marbles" attempts to satisfy both camps, and I think it succeeds. The opener, "The Invisible Man" sounds like the best of the most experimental bits of "Anoraknophobia" condensed into about thirteen minutes; the first sections of dub rhythms and atmospheric soundscapes slowly build in intensity before everything drops away to a gentle Floydian section of piano and bluesy guitar, which then leads into to a big wall-of-sound climax.
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