Review: Marillion – An Hour Before It’s Dark (2022)

An Hour Before It’s Dark is Marillion’s 20th studio album.

You can have many opinions about Marillion’s music, but there is hardly anyone who can question the band’s work ethic. Since their debut in 1983, the band have released their 19th studio album, an album every two years by count. In practice, there have been albums almost every year, with a few longer breaks in between.

The band’s productivity is at least partly explained by the fact that relations between its members have been exceptionally smooth. In the band’s early days, the line-up, and especially the drum section, was a turbulent place, but after original vocalist Fish left the band in 1988 with a fiery conflict, the roster has remained unchanged for 34 years. Not many rock bands can match that.

If one were to compare Marillion’s work ethic and enduring line-up to progressive rock, the bands that come to mind are Rush and Cheer-Accident.

Canadian trio Rush operated with the same full-length from 1974 until 2018, when the band called it quits when it became clear that seriously ill drummer Neil Peart would no longer be able to play. Peart died in 2020, but Rush took a few long breaks from recording and have not released any new music since 2012’s Clockwork Angels. Score one for Marillion.

Avant-prog band Cheer-Accident have released over 20 studio albums since 1986 which puts them roughly on par and above Marillion. However, there is no consistent line-up for Cheer-Accident as they are more of a project built around drummer Thymme Jones than a real band. Again, points for Marillion.

Marillion’s steady line-up has also led to a steady artistic output, both in terms of quality and style. As the band has not needed or gained any new blood, there have been no dramatic changes in musical style.

In the long run, however, Marillion’s style has changed a lot, but the changes have been very subtle, step by step and album by album. Whereas in the early 80s Marillion were often condemned as Genesis clones, today the band’s music sounds more like Radiohead than the aforementioned prog pioneers. Which is not to say that Marillion actually sound much like Radiohead at all. Stylistically, however, Marillion is nowadays more of an art rock band than a prog band. However, Marillion’s prog roots can still be heard and felt strongly in their music. An example of this is the often very long songs.

Mark Kelly, Ian Mosley, Steve Hogarth, Steve Rothery and Pete Trewavas.

Interestingly, Marillion have made more long epics in the 2000s than they did in the 80s when they were more clearly operating under the prog label. This is a testament to the fact that Marillion can do very much what they want these days and their small (actually quite large by prog standards) audience faithfully follows. And the audience’s loyalty is of course repaid by consistency and a certain commitment to their own style.

Consistency is also a small problem with Marillion. The band has released a lot of albums and there have been no real disasters (Radiation and Somewhere Else are the closest thing to a dud), but on the other hand, there have also been few true classics. My own reaction to a new Marillion album is often ”oh, nice, this sounds pleasant again”, but in the long run they are too often left to languish on the shelf. On the other hand, it has to be said that I think Marillion have released four masterpieces (two with Fish and two with Steve Hogarth) and that’s not a weak performance.

The Marillion 2000s started strong with the release in 2001 of the great Anoraknophobia and the crowd-funded Marbles (which brought Marillion huge attention in the mainstream media), one of the band’s four masterpieces. Since Marbles, the track record has been more uneven. Some of the highlights include 2012’s Sounds That Can’t Be Made and, in particular, 2016’s angry Fuck Everyone and Run (FEAR), with which Marillion made their political stance clearer than ever before.

Lue myös: Levyarvio: Marillion – Misplaced Childhood (1985)

Traditionally, guitarist Steve Rothery has been the driving force behind Marillion as a composer, but FEAR was mostly the work of keyboardist Mark Kelly. An Hour Before It’s Dark was also apparently largely written by Kelly, and stylistically it can be seen as a sister album to FEAR. Both albums are characterised by a certain ’cinematic’ sound and a strong emotional pathos. These elements are certainly not new to Marillion, but they have become more prominent than ever before. Kelly’s dominance can also be heard in the growing role of keyboards. However, it’s not a question of furious keyboard solos, but of how the song structures rest largely on a varied keyboard layers.

There is one fresh ingredient on the album, a small mixed choir Choir Noir on three tracks, which further increases the dramatic impact of the music. Actually, it’s not a brand new flavour, as Marillion already tried the choir for the first time on With Friends from the Orchestra (2019).

An Hour Before It’s Dark is a somewhat elusive whole. It contains four long suites divided into several different sections. Alongside these suites are two standard-length pieces and a 29-second fragment. The fact that I, for one, have not learned to mirror the song list and indexing of CDs with what my instrument tells me does not help me to perceive the whole. The numbers don’t seem to match! More problematic, however, is that some of the long pieces seem a bit haphazardly scribbled together. Although I wrote above that Kelly’s role as a composer is greater than before, Marillion’s working method this time around has again been to jam out a number of musical blanks in their own studio, which are then stiched together with the producer (again, Michael Hunter, who has worked with Marillion since 2007) into some sort of larger whole. Sometimes this way of working produces great results, but other times the end result is Frankenstein’s monsters without heads or tails. This time the least successful is the 11-minute ”Sierra Leone” which mostly just floats along out of shape, coming to life for a few climactic moments.

An Hour Before It’s Dark was written/recorded in the early days of the corona pandemic so it’s no wonder that the world-shaking phenomenon is also featured in the lyrics written by vocalist Steve Hogarth for the album.

”Murder Machines” describes humans in a wickedly mournful way as ”murder machines” who unwittingly and unknowingly carry viruses that can be fatal to other humans.

The album-closing 15-minute long ”Care” grows into an epic anthem for medical staff who sacrifice themselves for other people in precarious circumstances. Touchingly, ”Care” also turns the touch of fear of ”Murder Machines” on its head at the very end and elevates it to a downright heroic act.

Marillion have found their politics in the 2010s and their previous album FEAR in particular dealt with the current state of the world in a very critical tone. The big corporations that have enslaved the entire planet and the billionaires pulling the strings behind them who are ”too big to fail”. In An Hour Before It’s Dark, similar criticism is directed, somewhat uncomfortably but rightly, at ordinary citizens.

The best track on the album, the 9-minute, fatal-sounding, forward-thundering ”Be Hard On Yourself” urges you to look in the mirror and be hard on yourself, as the song’s title suggests. Have we sunk into blind consumerism and are we destroying the planet in the process just to make life as easy as possible for us? A good question to ask again and again even if deep down we know the answer even if we don’t want to admit it to ourselves.

Cause of death: Lust for luxury
Cause of death: Lust for luxury
Cause of death: Consumption
The only way forward is to fall over
Or you can learn to be
Or you can learn to be
Hard on yourself

Another highlight is, already mentioned, ”Murder Machines” which is ”just” a good pop song among the somewhat vague suites of the album. ”Murder Machines” thunders along with a great groove combining machines and Ian Mosley’s drums and a really catchy chorus. I’m not usually an ”accompanying singer” type of guy, but with ”Murder Machines” I have to make an exception.

I put my arms around her
I put my arms around her
I put my arms around her
And I killed her with love
I killed her with love
I killed her

Although the lyrics are dark, the music is surprisingly bright. Even the tempos are a little faster than we have come to expect from Marillion in recent decades. Of course, these worthy gentlemen don’t go into any read hard-rocking, but Ian Mosley in particular is beating his drums more vigorously than he has for a long time. Steve Rothery rips out many fine and slightly rougher-than-usual guitar solos, with Kelly’s full-bodied synths throbbing alongside him. Vocalist Hogarth is also still in good form, cracking his vocals energetically at the peak of the songs and then quietly muttering in his familiar way as a contrast.

Lue myös:

An Hour Before It’s Dark reached number two on the UK album chart after its release in the UK, the band’s best performance since 1987’s Clutching At Straws. Unfortunately, this does not reflect the band’s new breakthrough into the mainstream, but rather how few albums are sold these days and how tenaciously Marillion fans follow the band from album to album. Still, it’s a great achievement and a sign that there’s still a demand for Marillion music.

It will be interesting to see how long Marillion can keep up their steady quality and how long the fitness of ageing musicians lasts. The physical nature of the job means that drummers are the most vulnerable of musicians, but Mosley (b. 1953), who is slightly older than the rest of the Marillion, has so far seemed to be able to withstand the rigours of his profession without any problems. It’s a little hard to believe that after all these decades any Marillion member would be replaced by a new one, but stranger things have certainly been seen and experienced in the rock business.

An Hour Before It’s Dark is always at least pleasant, at times even excellent, to listen to, but it cannot be hailed as a very significant album. It’s ”just another” Marillion album. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that An Hour Before It’s Dark is a braver performance than most other bands over 40 are capable of in the studio these days. If they even bothered to try. An Hour Before It’s Dark is not a great masterpiece, but another victory in Marillion’s long streak of work for which there is no end in sight so far. And that is a happy thing.

Best songs: ’Be Hard On Yourself’, ’Reprogram The Gene’, ’Murder Machines’, ’Care’

Rating: 4 out of 5.
Author: JANNE YLIRUUSI

Keywords: Marillion, 2022

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Tracks

  1. ”Be Hard On Yourself” 9:27
    i. ”The Tear in the Big Picture”
    ii. ”Lust for Luxury”
    iii. ”You Can Learn”
  2. ”Reprogram the Gene” 7:00
    i. ”Invincible”
    ii. ”Trouble-Free Life”
    iii. ”A Cure for Us?”
  3. ”Only a Kiss” 0:39
  4. ”Murder Machines” 4:20
  5. ”The Crow and the Nightingale” 6:35
  6. ”Sierra Leone” 10:51
    i. ”Chance in a Million”
    ii. ”The White Sand”
    iii. ”The Diamond”
    iv. ”The Blue Warm Air”
    v. ”More Than a Treasure”
  7. ”Care” 15:18
    i. ”Maintenance Drugs”
    ii. ”An Hour Before It’s Dark”
    iii. ”Every Cell”
    iv. ”Angels on Earth”

Marillion

Pete Trewavas: bass guitar Ian Mosley: drums Steve Rothery: electric guitar Mark Kelly: keyboards Steve Hogarth: vocals

Guests

Choir Noir: choir  (”Murder Machines”, ”The Crow and the Nightingale”, ”Care”)

Producers: Michael Hunter, Marillion

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