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.

It’s done. Another live album by New Model Army, who have been my favourite music group for a long time. Another entry in the impressive discography of the band, spanning ten studio albums and a number of live documents, among others. Their songs and lyrics have accompanied me for years and some of them are inseparably connected to phases and stages of my life. Reason enough for me to constantly keep track of their work, and when I saw that this live album, entitled “Fuck Texas, Sing For Us” was available online (through 7Digital, a very recommendable online store), I wasted little time buying and downloading it. And already the first song indicates that, even after 27 years of band history, New Model Army are far from finished. (continue reading…)