GUEST: Marillion – Marbles

3 May 2004
Don’t Hurt Yourself, July 2004

“Are you at my table, darling?” –Steven Wilson, to Steve Hogarth

Over the course of Marillion’s history, the band has complained early and often about how they don’t get no respect amongst the music press. During the Fish era there were the constant Genesis comparisons, of course, and then during the Hogarth era there was stuff like that infamous moment where Q (rest in peace) published a nice review of Afraid of Sunlight but refused to interview or write about the band any further. If they were so great, they reasoned, why didn’t the press want anything to do with them?

Some of Marillion’s generally frosty reception amongst the journalisme de musique types could probably be chalked up to the band generally existing, with the possible exception of the late Fish era, at right angles to whatever was popular. Remember, only wankers made progressive albums in the 90s. Here, meanwhile, was a band who may have scored a #2 hit once, but that was in a different decade with a different singer, and they’re still pretending they’re on top of the world while their popularity is clearly on the wane, so that must mean they’re turbowankers. Did whoever wrote those nice things about Afraid of Sunlight for Q actually listen to the album?

Come to think of it, that’s actually why their funny relationship with what’s popular is only part of the reason Marillion never really get their dues: the fact of the matter is, to be a fan of Marillion in 2004 requires an ability to swallow a truly heroic amount of cringe. Of course, before we continue we must acknowledge our own hypocrisies. We run a Steven Wilson blog here, so we know from cringe, especially once we hit the Metal and Pop Eras. You can’t kvetch about some other band being cringy when the protagonist of your story infamously parodied millennials with the line “Xbox is a god to me.” That said, Steven Wilson cringe always feels weirdly discrete, like, oh, the kickass music just happens to have an old man yelling at cloud over top. You could freeze it off like a wart and things would be fine. Marillion cringe, meanwhile, is baked deep into their bones.

This has been a constant all the way back to the Fish era. The instrumental wankery of the first two albums comes immediately to mind, of course, but the singular Fish-era example that stands out is Incommunicado, where Derek Dick is hooting and hollering and yelping like he’s just snorted some truly powerful cocaine, at one point hurling himself full-bore into declaring himself, literally, a “rootin’-tootin’ cowboy.” In the Hogarth era, you got the entire concept of Afraid of Sunlight, that absolutely bizarre Beach Boys pastiche in Cannibal Surfer Babe (he was born in nineteen sixty weird, all right), H moaning about what an awful load male privilege is to bear in An Accidental Man, H moaning about how “every girl out there’s got Built-In Bastard Radar” as if that’s an innate thing and not a reaction to the horrors of patriarchy, the fact that Steve Hogarth calls himself “H,” the list of self-help fauxspirational slogans in Rich (paradoxically the best song off marillion.com, one of the best songs the band released in the 90s, and probably the closest the band has come in the H era to reflecting popular music trends of the time)…we could go on. It’s a bit much to say that after Fish left he took the band’s dignity with him, but post-split, and especially as he settled into his groove post-Raingods, Derek Dick has generally done a better job presenting himself as a “serious” artist in his solo work than his former band has. (This does come with the caveat that Fish and Marillion’s respective work this millennium aren’t exceptionally different from each other.)

This, then, leads to one inexorable question: how does one appreciate Marillion? The same way one appreciates any band with the capacity to embarrass themselves in a public space without any shame whatsoever: with tongue in cheek as needed, and also with a particular admiration of the sheer chutzpah that comes with that level of not giving a shit about how they come across. (This is, incidentally, also the appropriate way to appreciate Steven Wilson.) Take them for what they are, and you’ll be rewarded immensely.

So. Marbles. Marillion’s thirteenth album, and their ninth with H. This album sits squarely in the middle of that weird period they had between Brave and Sounds That Can’t Be Made where they almost but not quite properly found a voice and direction. This album represents the closest thing they had during this time period to a sustainable success mode, shooting for this particular mix of tenderness (mostly via Hogarth’s vocals) and emotional intensity (mostly through the instrumentation) where you’re given significant latitude to make a fool of yourself, because that just means you’re feelin’ it. Stuff like Genie (which SW mixed) or The Only Unforgivable Thing or Angelina hits right at the sweet spot where it’s corny, yes, but not so corny that it overtakes the song’s ambitions. (Songs like The Damage don’t, but that’s more because “you’re a natural woman” hits a bit sideways, especially with H’s weirdly triumphant delivery.) The first half is the strongest, starting as it does with the cinematic majesty of The Invisible Man and wrapping up with the epic tragedy of Ocean Cloud.

It is Ocean Cloud specifically that is probably the most fascinating song on this album, telling the story of Don Allum, the first man to row across the Atlantic in both directions, describing in poetic terms the toll such an endeavor exacts upon the mind and body, and the frame of mind one would have to be in to (a) try something like that and (b) find fulfillment in doing it. (Each crossing severely damaged his health, leaving him malnourished and deteriorated sight and hearing in the short term and with failing kidneys in the long term. He would die in 1992 of a heart attack.) Ocean Cloud is the best song on the album, and as such offers a sustainable path forward for the band.

The funny thing about marillion.com is that most of the successful songs on that album are very, very poppy. They’d had a particular inclination toward pop music since Misplaced Childhood, but marillion.com is the one album in the Hogarth era where they were able to indulge that inclination fully. Unfortunately, that album also landed at their commercial nadir, and was also the last studio album they released before pivoting to the crowdfunding model that’d sustain them for the rest of their career, so their attempt at exhuming the recently-deceased ghost of Britpop sounds in hindsight like one last stab at mainstream relevance before deciding to cultivate the fanbase they already have. And the fact of the matter is, the fan who’d donate to a Marillion crowdfunding campaign probably wants something closer to Brave than a collection of pop songs. When you’re a prog band whose commercial peak is long behind you, you can’t build a career off something like marillion.com.

You can, however, build a career off something like Marbles. This record is pretty much exactly what a 2000s Marillion album ought to sound like. It’s grand and sweeping and intimate and cinematic and was popular enough that You’re Gone became the band’s first top ten hit in seventeen years and the whole album would have cracked the top 30 in the UK album charts if it wasn’t DQ’d on a technicality. The band could do stuff with this.

That said, the full potential something like Marbles offered wouldn’t be realized until almost a decade later. The intervening years have their own little moments of weirdness, some of which works (the more experimental stuff on disc 2 of Happiness is the Road), some of which doesn’t (the sarcastic “God bless the UK, God bless la belle France” moment in The Last Century for Man), some of which needs to be seen to be believed because of its sheer gobsmacking absurdity on a conceptual level and therefore exists in a world beyond whether or not it “works” (that cover of Britney’s Toxic they performed live in 2007). In general, though, it still felt like Marbles was an aberration (a welcome aberration, but one nevertheless) and they never quite recovered from the fallow period they entered following Brave. But then Gaza happened.

If we’re talking about Marillion’s capacity for cringe, Gaza, the seventeen-minute barnstormer of an opening track off Sounds That Can’t Be Made, is up there as one of the cringiest songs they’ve ever recorded. It’s also one of their best. It’s meant to be a commentary on the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, as told from the perspective of someone growing up there. As such, it has many of the flaws that songs written by white people about humanitarian crises in the developing world usually have (cf: U2), falling headfirst into overwrought, melodramatic misery porn, right up to the painfully earnest repeated “it just ain’t right” and the plea for foreign intervention at the very end…and yet, somehow, inexplicably, as a piece of music, it works.

I suspect part of the reason it works is that stray line toward the end, “it’s like a nightmare rose up from this small strip of land, slouching toward Bethlehem.” This appropriation of Yeats’ The Second Coming (an appropriation Yeats himself would have disapproved of but fuck him) is kind of interesting because it kicks the events of the song into a more mythic register that I don’t usually see outside of, like, Zionists and Islamophobes who want to frame the Israel-Palestine conflict as some sort of clash of civilizations (a framing which Marillion is patently uninterested in), which I think gives a clearer idea of what the stakes of this conflict are for the people who live there. Furthermore, for as much as Marillion bend over backwards to avoid explicitly fingering the State of Israel itself, even releasing a statement saying they’re not trying to be anti-Semitic and they talked to people on Both Sides, the lyrics are still stuffed top to bottom with references to an oppressive unseen enemy that could only be the military of one nation. Also, for as much as Marillion in that statement swear up and down that they Don’t Condone Violence, the song also understands what happens when an occupied, oppressed people are denied self-determination or even a peaceful redress of grievances, and make it very clear that when people in Gaza do engage in acts of violence, it’s not because of any deeply held bigotry but a reaction to a system that’s destroying them. “Peace won’t come from standing on our necks,” the song says, and in the process of making that point is unambiguous about precisely who conjured up the nightmare now slouching towards Bethlehem.

The album after that one, 2016’s Fuck Everyone And Run, takes that whole atmosphere of impending doom first explored in Gaza and crafts an entire album around it (fitting, in the year of Brexit and Trump), and is probably the best album of the Hogarth era. That record also peaked at #4 in the UK album charts, the band’s best showing since Clutching at Straws. So in addition to its own (accidental?) merits as a song, Gaza could also be credited as the thing that gave the Ideal Marillion Sound gestured toward in songs like Ocean Cloud and The Invisible Man a definite shape. They’re gonna be just fine.

Steven Wilson, meanwhile, after contributing those mixes for two songs off Marbles, fades into the band’s extreme periphery. He doesn’t go away completely, though. Wilson was tapped to remix Misplaced Childhood and Brave and will show up on at least one band member’s side project. What we have here, then, is a occasionally distant, occasionally close decades-long dance between two artists who are capable of making great music but who are also unafraid of faceplanting (Marillion from being overearnest, Wilson from yelling at cloud) in front of their audience, both having that balance of talent and chutzpah that has the potential to produce embarrassing dogshit…but at the same time can also result in absolute brilliance. These two were made for each other.

GUEST: Darkroom – The DAC Mixes

1 May 2004

That awkward moment when a) you realized you accidentally skipped over quite a few Bass Communion goodies to get here, but b) given the slightly experimental way Bass Communion posts generally turn out there’s also no good place to talk about what you missed. So here we are.

Invisible Soundtracks – Macro 3 (July 2000)

Bass Communion’s contribution is called Quantico. Typical BC of this era, I think. Lots of muted horns over what sounds like bitcrushed rain falling against a window. Nice, but it’s not something I’m likely to remember.

Silver Apples – Remixes (2000)

The electronic music pioneers did a remix of a Bass Communion song and called it “Simeon Meets Drugged.” I can’t find it online.

The Fire This Time (2002)

This album is a compilation thingamajig that was meant to Raise Awareness of the horrors the Gulf War and sanctions on the Iraqi state brought on the people who lived there. Bass Communion’s contribution, No News is Good News, is a collab with musician Naseer Shamma, whose oud is wrangled, haunting and dirgelike, into something similar to what Wilson did with the shamisen on 43553E9.01. The inclusion of Shamma, who’s actually from Iraq, automatically makes this a better commentary on contemporary Mideastern politics than anything Wilson did with Muslimgauze.

Monolake – Momentum (October 2003)

The song Tetris samples Dwarf Artillery and it shows. Sounds good, tho.

D A R K R O O M

Now we’re back to the present. Darkroom is Andrew “Os” Ostler, who did a thing for Flowermix, and Mike Bearpark, and is the Bownessosophere’s answer to Bass Communion. This project has the same emphasis on atmosphere and texture that Bass Communion does, but it’s significantly less minimalistic and more friendly to beats, dynamics, radio samples, and little weird bursts of noise that blip in and out for no reason. Sometimes in the early days Bowness himself would show up to wail atonally over whatever Os and Bearpark had cooked up that day. That said, even though compositionally Darkroom is more improvisational and complex than Bass Communion, largely derived from extended live performances, it still works on a similar level: as music to fall into a trance to, as it washes over and swirls around and flows through you.

In 2001, the Cambridge Museum of Technology hosted a festival called Digital/Analogue Cambridge, in which various experimental musicians were stationed at certain points and the audience was invited to wander from one to another as the music collided and interacted with each other. Darkroom appeared on the festival’s final day and performed for about three hours. This original performance, called Keeping Ambience Alive, never saw an official release. We do, however, have the remixes, suggesting perhaps that Darkroom view the Cambridge performance primarily as raw material for what would come later. (Although this of course means I’m once again wondering what the original performance actually sounded like, so I have a frame of reference to talk about the remixes. I’m not sure if they played from a setlist or, as was their custom, improvised some original material.)

Similar to what Bass Communion did with Reconstructions and Recycling, Darkroom commissioned a series of artists, such as Theo Travis, Rhinoceros, and Bass Communion himself, and gave them an hour’s worth of Digital/Analogue footage to play with. The result is The DAC Mixes.

The sole Darkroom original on this record, Butterfly2, shimmers and warbles similar to a Bass Communion song. Bass Communion’s own contribution, After Dark, follows soon after, is centered around some harsh pinging and humming over some low shuffling in the background. Dark Tomb initially moves in a similar, more ambient direction to the BC remix before it but about halfway through abruptly shifts into a more staticky, electrical mode before fading out to the sounds of metal scraping against metal. Moving on, DJ Dictaphone’s Interlude is gentle and ambient, while Tears in X-Ray Eyes’ Dreams Come Licking is dark and tense while at the same time feeling vaguely soothing.

Theo Travis’ Ambitronic Remix was a bit of a surprise. As a solo performer I’m obviously more familiar with his straight jazz work, and although he’s worked on ambient/experimental music before, most prominently in the Drugged suite, I didn’t know he had something like this in him. This remix does appear to take stylistic inspiration from the Drugged suite, although that might be me thinking every piece of ambient music of a certain subgenre and involving certain people sounds like the Drugged suite, albeit with a lot of howling distorted guitar samples fading in and out in the background.

Sir Real did a 21st Century Schizoid Remix whose title has no relation to the actual music…except for how it starts off serene and peaceful and suddenly crackles and explodes in a burst of harsh noise about halfway through. Rhinoceros we remember from the disrespectful trip hop remix they contributed to Reconstructions and Recycling; here they contribute something pounding and gurgling, dynamic and noisy without being too cacophonous, with a sexy bassline leisurely doin’ its thing on top. I’m also pretty sure that’s two remix albums I’ve listened to so far where the Rhinoceros track was a serious highlight.

Finally, there’s Nemeton, who contributed four remixes to the project. The second one appears here, while the other three appeared on the slight return follow-up compilation. When attempting to describe this thing the words “clanging drones” comes immediately to mind, however much sense that makes.

A lot of this sounds…familiar. With one prominent exception, most of these artists basically followed Bass Communion’s lead and turned the source material into something like a Bass Communion song. Unfortunately, when Darkroom’s main strength is its variety, most of these remixes feel like a decided step down. Although some of the remixes had their moments–Sir Real’s, for instance–it still feels like Rhinoceros is the only artist here who was able to create something that both retained what I imagine is the spirit of the original recording and still managed to sound original.

Darkroom is still going, really taking advantage of digital recording’s infinite canvas, releasing longer and more experimental records, some of which clock in at like three hours and change. Os will retain Darkroom as his primary creative outlet, but Bearpark will remain an integral part of the constellation of people Tim Bowness surrounds himself with, and so he’ll show up here again before too long.