33 rebellions per minute
"Speak to the present in the past and the future tense"
1985
Marillion, MISPLACED CHILDHOOD
Yes's CLOSE TO THE EDGE ('72) was rightly considered the defining album of the first wave of progressive rock-- not my favorite prog album, or even my favorite Yes album, but the most brilliantly, thoroughly worked-out achievement of progressive rock's agreed-on goals at the time-- and not surprisingly it was a hit, topping charts in the US and UK. The defining moment of 1980's prog-rock would, again by my opinion and by fan consensus, be Marillion's third album, MISPLACED CHILDHOOD: a substantial hit in Britain, and a less complete flop in the United States than prog in general at the time.
It's unfair, of course, to stereotype a decade. Even as a college freshman in autumn '91, attending my first "remember the '80's?" party and thoroughly amused by the idea, I had enough musical knowledge to realize they were defining out a number of perfectly real albums: no flaky pop experiments like the Boomtown Rats' MONDO BONGO, no dark proto-Bjork eccentrics like Nina Hagen, no scabrous punk a la the Dead Kennedys. Looking back now I also realize they ignored bands and movements now regarded, for better or worse, among the decades' most important: the Replacements, Husker Du, Napalm Death, Minor Threat. However, what the partiers had in their defense was: the pop charts. CLOSE TO THE EDGE's 20-minute suites, unlimited instrumental talent on display, attempted spiritual lyrics, and dynamic flips from hymnals to searingly heavy riffs: those were in the middle of prosperous trends encompassing everyone from Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin ("Sabbath Bloody Sabbath", "Achilles' Heel") through Andrew Lloyd-Webber and the Kinks (JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, PRESERVATION ACTS 1 TO 3) to the hippie and anti-hippie wankery of the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and Frank Zappa. By the 1980's, however, music that people bought in droves was simpler in structure and performance; downshifted to love and loss in topic; glossier and more layered in production. Compare band-by-band over time, among the '70's leftovers: BORN TO RUN with BORN IN THE USA, or WHO ARE YOU with FACE DANCES, or AQUALUNG with UNDER WRAPS, or A NIGHT AT THE OPERA with THE MIRACLE, or, indeed, CLOSE TO THE EDGE with 90125; even Dire Straits, blues-rock fundamentalists, recorded three of the '80's niftiest synth-pop hits before recovering their compass. Progressive rock, by its nature, _has_ to be complicated-- which is, perhaps, why Marillion managed to be the most-recognized prog band name to American audiences while barely selling squat-- but it's surely no coincidence that Marillion's success came in modeling their compositional style on Genesis, probably the least intimidatingly talented of the major first-wave prog bands. MISPLACED CHILDHOOD is pretty, overtfully tuneful, hooky, and it _gleams_.
"Pseudo Silk Kimono"'s opening, in a different time, would have been an orchestral theme rather than a synth-fest: rising but minor-key fanfare, a wistful expression of attempted hope. Fish-- a dumb pseudonym for a lead singer until you realize going through life as Derek Dick must have been even worse for him-- brings his urgent Peter Gabrielesque voice in a scat-sung melody that fades behind ringing, echoey guitar (by Steve Rothery) in the style of David Gilmour in Pink Floyd's THE WALL. Momentum arrives by way of choppy synth-marimba power chords; a bell-like hook introduces "Kayleigh", the kind of pop song you could just assume, rightly, hit #2 on the (UK) charts. We see here how Fish, best known as a lyricist for convoluted wordplay, has settled into standard simple storytelling of the kind where we, the listener, are assumed to be ready to provide character and motivation: "Oh, by the way, didn't I break your heart/ please excuse me, I didn't mean to break your heart/.../but you broke mine". Yes, CHILDHOOD is a story album of heartbreak and redemption, and if they aren't quite universal themes in experience, then we've each watched enough movies to relate. "Kayleigh, I'm still trying to write that love song/ it seems more important now you're gone", he sings, and as piano and synth team up for the flowing intro to "Lavender", he finds his words in a children's sing-song: "When I am king, dilly-dilly, you will be queen". I hope you like the lilting melody as much as I do; it'll be back.
"Bitter Suite" is the first piece to exceed four minutes: it last more than seven, which is enough to encompass five separate sections, from the "Lavender" outro (sustained organ chord, hoot-owl, and a fairly awesome long drum-and-stick roll over which keyboards make "fffffffwwit!" sounds) through the spoken vocals slyly self-referencing "some obscure Scottish poet", to the slowly driving minor-key complaint song ("She was a wallflower at 16, she'll be a wallflower at 34"), to another remarkable drum-fest introducing a major-key shift (revising "Kayleigh"s melody), to a piano/guitar etude. If it's hard to see how this structurally differs from the 90's uberslack of Guided By Voices (another sometimes-great band) with their minute-long songs, the later "Blind Man's Curve" will confuse you yet more: six sections in nine minutes. But again, the difference is the care of refraction. Listen to how the anxious synth-xylophone confusion that opens "Waterhole" reappears in the same rhythm and shape as major-key, Rush-styled electric guitar at the end of the song; then by "Lords Of The Backstage" it's been organized, now bell-like, into a slamming 7/8 time signature. Hear how "...Curve" follows its own section of spoken, or hissed, vocals with a theme worthy of Star Wars, then concludes with the album's second rewrite of "Lavender". Listen as Ian Moseley's massive drumkit and cymbal roll of "Heart Of Lothian" is both individually remarkable and an implied reference back to "...Suite". Hear how "Childhood's End" opens with the same guitar figure as "Kayleigh" but reconfigures from that energetically yearning pop song to this triumphal burst of Rush-like power chording.
You're allowed to ask "So what?", of course. Any answer will be subjective. The principle by which Marillion were operating, however, was that it's good to be artisitically ambitious, to appeal at once to people's hearts and minds. Large polished machines have inspired awe at least as far back as the lost Futurist art movements of 100 years ago; if the machines do difficult arrays of procedures seamlessly, that's another level of appeal; and if the poor things still need a mate, that can inspire awww (right, Commander Data?). As a popular vision that applied to music, it didn't last long: from the rise of the Linn Drum to the rise of cheap irony, about ten years. Just long enough, in fact, to pick someone to respresent a decade.
1987
Marillion, CLUTCHING AT STRAWS
I firmly believe there are constant little subtleties in Marillion music that I subconsciously recognize in an instant as sounding, specifically, like Marillion. Still, most of their sound of the '80's wasn't hard to consciously disassemble into the tunes and structures of Peter Gabriel's Genesis, and instumental parts indebted to either Roger Waters's Pink Floyd or '80's-era Rush. What were Moseley's massive check-the-price-on-this-baby explorations of his drum kit but a (superb) homage to Neal Peart? How many of Steve Rothery's guitar lines can you sort into THE WALL or MOVING PICTURES? CHILDHOOD brought independent influences into the picture: some of the crystalline layered perfectionism of Jane Siberry, a bit of repressed giddiness that might turn, if all five band members would let down their guards at once, into a "Manic Monday" or an Icicle Works' "Evangeline". STRAWS was noteworthy for a decisive turn towards the Pink Floyd sound.
Suddenly bassist Pete Trawavas played flawless Roger Waters bass lines; suddenly Moseley repressed his drums into the ominous reverbed banging of Nick Mason. Rothery didn't fully join the program. The brittle pendulum-swing leads on "Slainte Mhath", as if all the strings sequentially underwent phantom fingerings every time Rothery picked one of them, was purest David Gilmour, but he also fused gloss, aggression, and contemplativeness onto one "White Russian" solo as if he were Alex Lifeson of Rush, and he helped turn hit single "Incommunicado" into "Jump"-era Van Halen. But in general Fish's largely unchanged songwriting started to be filtered through a lumbering, ponderous instrumental grid-- which may, for all I know, be part of why he went solo after this album.
The unsettling xylophone loop that opens "Hotel Hobbies" had the cadence to be one of those minute-long AT+T ads that used to try to terrify TV viewers out of switching to MCI or Sprint (the same ad campaign also used Wire's "40 Versions"), but the four-song suite that "...Hobbies" begins then spits out fewer distinct ideas than did CHILDHOOD's "Blind Man's Curve", because for one thing the band is slowly working out every implication of the ideas they do have. On the upside, "Sugar Mice" and "...Mhath" and "That Time Of The Night" forge what would become Marillion's clearest trademark: take the atmospheric bits from THE WALL, and infuse them with elegant balladic melody. "Just For The Record", an unconvincing swearing-off of liquor that appropriately sounds like a glistening song now worn in patches to whisper and echo, is another variant, the pretty generic synth-pop song at double the grace and three times the complexity. "Torch Song" has Fish singing his lines in a percussive fashion that co-operates, not fights, with the deliberate pace ("read some KeroUAC/ and it put me on the TRACK"), and benefits. The stately closing semi-victory of "the Last Straw" features a vocalist who sounds just like that orgasm gal from Floyd's "the Great Gig In The Sky" singing words, but hey, that's another touch that isn't stolen, just... revised. Reworked. Referring back, so you pay attention.
Lyrically, Fish has regained his ambition. STRAWS is a set of songs from the viewpoints of tavern regulars, pondering difficult relationships, lost self-control, needs for secrecy, and fear of kids today. The characterizations are impressive, to me. I'd like to argue that their lack of bright spots is a failure of observation: where are Mike Royko's happy barroom chats with Slats Grobnik, or James Thurber's ballplayer banter, or Spider Robinson's Cross-Time Saloon camaraderies of joy and laughter and rescue? Maybe I'd be right. But Royko got arrested multiple times for drunk driving and drunk violence; Thurber made quotes and incidents up; Robinson's novels are openly fantasy. In my observations as well as Fish's, people who frequent bars join a community they'll never need to sacrifice for, or to demand much from in their own right; they pay a few bucks for defined and predictable pleasures instead of trying (and maybe failing) to create new ones; they accept people at their most lachrymose or fierce or incoherent, rather than the scarier task of dealing with people who are sane. I don't doubt, from repeated references to drinking through Fish's career, that he's done this himself: eventually he calculated the odds. He realized that he could achieve the same avoidances, without cirrhosis of the liver, by making pseudo-Phil Collins CD's on his own, as I understand. But first, with Marillion, he made one of the best and wisest Pink Floyd albums you could buy. Even if you can tell he didn't mean to.
1999
Fish, RAINGODS WITH ZIPPOSTM
I don't actually have any of Fish's rumored bland-pop records. They weren't released in America, and why would I try to import them with recommendations like that? But SUNSET ON EMPIRE ('97) was reputed to be a comeback, so when I saw a brand-new, U.S.-distributed Fish album in the racks where I was looking for something else, it seemed worth a try. And indeed so: as of 5/11, it is the first album of 1999 I own that I genuinely expect to put on my (overcrowded) year-end Top Ten list.
Sell-outs to mushdom, if you insist on finding them here, can be found, I guess. "Incomplete" is a Meat Loaf song at 1/3 power: the soulful male-female duet about a decaying romance, over acoustic guitar and a string section. It would be unfair of me to point out how cleverly, yet nonjudgmentally, it deflates for examination the central assumptions of romance. Fish's "We got 140 stations on satellite beaming down into our home, but I'm watching you" is rebutted by Elisabeth Antwi's "I've got half a million bills to pay, you never hear a word I say", but Fish calmly resumes "I dream of you"-- this claim, that his dream compensates for reality, is then acknowledged in the rest of the song as semi-fair because how _else_ is thick-and-thin, forsaking all others supposed to work? "Incomplete" also concludes with an interesting mandolin/ glockenspiel duel. "Mission Statement" plays like a double-speed "Got To Get You Into My Life" that mixes its Motown with a chorus rock sizzle straight from some better-reported Huey Lewis & the News, and its undisguised idealism may offend people as naive: "Too busy crunching numbers and fighting for ourselves/ all it takes is kindness and a little loving care"??? But I'll take his plainspokenness, quite self-interestedly, over the far more naive assumption that daily economic "pragmatism" 1990's-style is going to keep this species around, and Fish's energy and reborn determination ("Punched the clock in at 35/ hard to believe tht I'm still alive") give the words all the eloquence they could need.
Other de-Marillionization: "Tilted Cross"'s more literary meditations, connecting the land-mine issue to questions of obligation to past as well as future generations, are set to soulful female backup, brush drums and tom-toms, and violin. "Faithhealer" opens on a dense churn of cello and double-bass and, after some quite familiar power-chord gravity, has a scary, weird violin solo. "Rites Of Passage" enters on a low drum rumble and the tiny faraway explosions of toy glass palaces; after a song and a synth-oboe solo, it fades to an extended drone that sets an experimental piano/pizzicato counterpoint. That's almost reminiscent of the best parts of New Age, where serious ethnomusicological scholarship merges with a love of strange shimmery sounds, a la Forrest Fang's old/new Chinese music in WORLD DIARY, and both "Old Haunts" and "Chocolate Frogs"-- parts 1 and 3 of the "Plague Of Ghosts" suite-- extend the feel. Part 2, "Digging It Deep", is quite like Peter Gabriel's "Digging In The Dirt" ('92), a single in which Gabriel's love of polyrhythmic foreignness merged with his need to remind everyone "Hey, I wrote 'Sledgehammer!'".
But you _did_ notice I said "suite", right? It has six parts. Where the album's first song "Tumbledown" is an all-new invocation of what was right about Big-'80's prog-rock-- a song that starts with a fully composed piano piece by Mickey Simmonds and effortlessly encompasses five distinct melodic sections including a chorus in 11/4 time without ever sounding other than grade-A pop-- the closing bits of "Plague Of Ghosts" play spot-the-reference, recontextualing parts straight from CHILDHOOD and STRAWS into new scraps of melody and texture. There's nothing to make them inferior to their predecessors; if anything, by featuring the most arresting (if odd) lyrical imagery of Fish's career, they might be in some ways improvements. Somehow, I'm guessing, Fish concluded that the last ten years of his music didn't count. Instead of apologizing, he picked up where he'd _really_ left off. And in prog-rock, as in a mini-series, you can't do that without recapitulating the highlights for people who missed the last show.
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