The Benja-man Is Verbose

Each post I've made about a so-called "Fish-era" Marillion record has included me lobbing a soft but still unnecessary insult at the current incarnation of Fish's former band, followed by a "just kidding" disclaimer.  That actually only happened organically once, and the rest was me just deciding to turn it into a running bit.  It does beg the question * , though, of what my experience is with post-Fish (or "h-era") Marillion. I've mentioned on multiple occasions that my Fish complete career retrospective - listening to and digesting every single record (usually for the first time), in order, along with a fuckton of live recordings - started as a Marillion career retrospective and led to me falling in love with Fish's music and adding his post-1987 output to the giant project.  I still continued the original plan, though, and also listened to all of Marillion's post-1987 output.  How did that go?  And why am I not writing th

Does a review of Eluveitie's discography necessitate talking about every other musical project that every one of its thirty (no exaggeration) past and present official members has been a part of?  Obviously not.  I do think Cellar Darling is a specific unique situation, though.  100% of Cellar Darling is former Eluveitie core members who both were major contributors to their sound and songwriting and very publicly left the main band together to form their own group.  This isn't a side project or a subsequent project.  For me it qualifies as a full-on Doctor Who style "bigeneration" of Eluveitie.  So to speak. Cellar Darling is Anna, Ivo, and Merlin, and I can't say who wrote what because they all get songwriting credit as a unit.  It ain't Chigrel, though!  Ivo handles bass on the record as well as guitar, and when touring they had some live people to fill in on bass, keys, etc... including at different times Shir-Ran Yinon and freakin' Rafi Kirder , both

There are times I kind of regret the decision to make my National reactions "immediate reactions" to each listen.  On the plus side you get unfiltered thoughts, which I guess prevents overthinking and overwriting everything.  On the minus side, well, there's way too often that I don't have anything intelligent to say.  My second listen to Trouble Will Find Me is one of those times.  I didn't get all that much out of the record this time, and it hasn't clicked yet as a whole quite the way I hoped it would.  To be clear, this does not mean that I don't still like the record.  My impressions remain positive.  This post is in fact going to end with a list of things I liked.  I simply can't say that much clicked on a deep level here.  Maybe I was distracted.  Maybe the hooks just aren't tight enough for the record to live up to its early promise.  Or maybe it just needs more listening. Is two listens to a record enough to make any meaningful judgments? 

Unlike Misplaced Childhood , the frame story dominates a little less in my listening, but it's worth at least acknowledging that there is a clear perspective - Fish's alter ego here is a character called Torch, a writer with a drinking problem and a self-doubt problem.  I can't imagine that it took much poetic license to put himself in that headspace.  But yeah, it's pretty well documented that this is the time that in real life he was basically subsisting on an all-booze-and-coke diet, questioning whether being part of a big rock band was actually something he wanted to do, and rapidly drifting apart from his brothers in the band who'd come up with him.  Hence, we get some depressing navel-gazing shit that doesn't have so much of a narrative arc... just some (warm wet) circling of a drain.  The songs, though... are they good to listen to?  Track by track as usual...     Track One - "Hotel Hobbies" The intro track.  Apparently intro tracks aren't m

Coming in, basically what I knew about Trouble Will Find Me was that at least a certain subset of music listeners think that the National peaked with the Boxer / High Violet era, and that Trouble was 55 minutes long.  The obvious fear, especially given that this is a band that would release two records in 2023 that snarky critics think contain one good record's worth of material between them, is that the National will get bloated with age.  So, is this record too much of an okay thing?  On first listen, I don't think so.  I have to say, on first listen, this is pretty solid. I got about four tracks in before my attention started to wander at all, after the first three songs ranged from solid to great.  And let's just get the negativity (not that there's much) out of the way: only one moment in sequential order made the record's length seem a little oppressive.  "Slipped" seems almost like it could be a melancholy closing track, and it fades out, and in co

For better or for worse, the stories of Marillion and Fish will always and forever center around their biggest footprint in pop culture, made by Misplaced Childhood .   This record was lightning in a bottle; nobody involved would ever be as mainstream-popular or mainstream-“cool” again.   So, what’s it like listening to as someone who never heard a note of it until more than thirty-five years after release?     Track One:   “Pseudo Silk Kimono” I don’t know if it would have been immediately obvious that MP is a concept album not knowing that going in, but “Pseudo Silk Kimono” immediately casts itself as an intro rather than so much a song.   I don’t know if there’s much point in evaluating the track as a complete piece of music, which it very much is not.   I think there may be a little too much reliance in knowing the backstory – real-life Fish was coming down from an acid trip shivering in Steve Rothery’s house wrapped in a kimono-thing he’d borrowed when he started coming up w