When it came to the follow-up, Clutching at Straws, they took a sharp left turn. Marillion hit the big time with the intense and personal-concept album Misplaced Childhood, which spawned their big hit single, Kayleigh. It still features regularly in Fish’s live sets as a solo artist. While the lyrics are perhaps a little overblown, Fish’s half-sung, half-ranted vocal gets disturbingly into the role of the jealous ex-lover of a celebrity. Driven by a propulsive riff, Incubus is a highlight, a song about revenge porn written three decades before it became a regular news item.
The beauty of Steven Wilson’s remix is how it creates even greater clarity and space in the instruments so that Steve Hogarth’s voice can seep through to the listener’s soul.Marillion’s second album, Fugazi, saw them leaving behind the notion that they were merely a pastiche of Gabriel-era Genesis, with a dense, layered sound that was far more their own. I often tell people that Marillion reaches emotional and musical planes that most other bands don’t know exist. But Hogarth, an uncommonly emotionally honest singer, turns one person’s search for connection, meaning, and redemption into something that is universal to the listener. On one level, Brave is a story about a girl found wandering naked and alone on a bridge (inspired by an actual incident). Repeat immersions in the album – for that is what it requires, a full commitment of ear, mind, and soul – reveals that Brave is a profound journey. Brave lacks Marillion’s usual knack for accessible melodies (though it certainly includes a few glorious choruses, including “Alone Again in the Lap of Luxury.”) Brave demands far more from the listener. But then this is a band that boasts that each album is a reaction to the one before it. ‘Where’s all the tunes?’ I complained to a friend. Yet, on first listen to Brave, I was disappointed.
From the artwork, it was apparent that this was no Holidays in Eden, the band’s previous album, an unsuccessful attempt at a crossover pop album. On the day of its release, I walked to a small record store in town to buy the CD and walked home admiring the cover illustration of a face ghosting behind a shroud of illegible words.
(Perhaps the only time in rock history that a replacement singer has bettered his excellent predecessor.) But I only became an ardent fan following the release of the band’s landmark release, Season’s End, with new vocalist Steve Hogarth in 1989. I’d been aware of the band since its 1985 breakthrough album, Misplaced Childhood, because I’d heard the hits on the radio. I was a sophomore at Hillsdale college the first time I heard Marillion’s Brave. Arguably the first album of third-wave prog. He graciously responded with this beautiful reply. I recently had the chance to ask my friend, Stephen Humphries ( Boston Globe, Prog, Christian Science Monitor), about his thoughts on Marillion’s BRAVE.
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