When I was playing this for the first time I could already imagine what had been written about it, and when I checked I found that I wasn’t disappointed. Yes, many seem to be saying that this is one of the finest albums that one is likely to find anywhere on the planet, so it looks like I am in the minority again. This isn’t a bad album, but neither is it a particularly good one. Unlike the debut, which featured the rest of Marillion as guests, here we are down to the core duo of Pete Trewavas (Marillion, Transatlantic) on bass, vocals, guitar, synth and programming and Eric Blackwood on vocals, guitar, synth and bass with Henry Rogers (DeeExpus, Touchstone) on drums and Wendy Farrell-Pastore on backing vocals.
I was supplied with this as a download to review, so I am not sure if this is the case with the CD, but there are only three songs, with “Silhouette’ coming in at 67 minutes long, and it isn’t possible to play just parts of this as it hasn’t been broken up (although the track listing does denote 12 sections). Now, I’m a proghead, and have no issue with long songs per se, but I don’t believe that this is a long song. To me this in a number of songs that have been put together in such a way that they can have an ‘epic’, but there isn’t enough inter-relation or repetition of refrains or key musical hooks to make one think that this is indeed one piece of music. And what’s worse, is that for the most part it is just plain boring.
There are some truly magnificent sections on the album as a whole, which had me doubting my own comments, but there are others where I just wanted to turn the whole thing off and play something that was far more interesting. I kept thinking back to The Flower Kings, who have produced some albums where they really need an outside set of ears to cull the material and provide some judicious editing, and the same is very much the case here. Looking at the chart for 2013 on PA, before I post this, I can see that this is ranked at #13 so there are a great deal of people who think that this is incredible. I’m just not one of them.
