Right as rainy

In 1997, Marillion released their ninth studio album ‘This Strange Engine’. Probably not their best piece of work, especially since it was released directly after the milestones ‘Brave’ and ‘Afraid of Sunlight’, but still a very decent album with a number of brilliant songs, as well as some of the more imaginative lyrics of the scene, such as ‘Estonia’, in which Steve Hogarth reflects on his encounter with one of the survivors of the Estonia disaster of 1994 ¹. Or one of my more personal favourites, ’80 Days’:

“Woke up last night under the mountains
Driving from Zurich to Milan
I lay there listening to the echoes
Thinking of Iceland and Japan
So many smiles, so many faces
And my home so far away
I lose some of me in all these places
And I can’t help the way I’m changed

All over the world in eighty days
Memories turn like magazine pages
What kind of a man could live this way
I do what I can
But I can’t escape it”

However, there is one thing I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. The first song ‘Man of a Thousand Faces’ is a great piece, with a nice piano part and interesting lyrics. It shows what Progressive Rock should be about – quality instead of quantity. Except that, when the song is essentially complete and over at approximately 4:10, the band felt the need to add another 3 minutes of atmospheric chants and other hoo-hah. Why they chose to take a completely rounded-off song and add the extra time, making it sound less complete as a result, has escaped me since I first heard it.

Any ideas? The comments are open.

Every year in September, gamers across South Africa get ready for rAge, the country’s biggest Gaming Expo and BYOC LAN. Every year, the tickets go on sale on the 1st of August, and every year they sell out within days. And again, every year you get people buying tickets in excess of what they need, for one sole purpose: to create a quick artificial shortage and then resell their excess at inflated prices.

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