FISH - Internal Exile (1991)

I'm going with the track listing from the brand new 2024 remaster, rather than the original order.  Prepping to write this post is the first time I'd ever listened to the songs in the new sequence, so let's see how it sounds that way.

Track One:  "Shadowplay"

Damn, I like the guitar part on the verses.  Given how impressive the chorus is, it says something that this is the part that jumps out.  I also like the chorus too.  Since we're all prog, the structure of "Shadowplay" goes mid-tempo intro, then shimmery chorus, then menacing verse/prechorus, then after a couple verses there's a solw fade out into a chanting repetition, and then a bridge, and then the final chorus is a different tempo as more of a Pink Floyd swirl of sound than a melody.  It takes skill to take a song that would be so powerful as a straight pop-rock song and build it into something more epic.   I guess this a slow-grower because I always knew this was a good song, but it's just now hitting really hard.  

Lyrically, well, clearly the work of a guy destined to get divorced like three times; since the first marriage failed so slowly and spectacularly I tend to presume it's the inspiration for most of the troubled relationship and breakup songs.  I'm reminded once again of BYAMPod and its host's snarky comment that Fish, both in his life and in his songs, really only has three modes - "in love," "furious," and "gardening."  To be clear, this was a quip, not (presumably) intended as a serious piece of music criticism.  However, I'll respond to it seriously be saying that actually, Fish has five modes.  One unmentioned one is the observer trying to set himself apart from the world while commenting on it, which we see in some of the other songs.  The fifth mode is "self doubt."  Both in real life, where to this day he goes through a "who am I, really?" mini crisis roughly once a month, and in his songs, constant questions and crippling confusion take center stage often.  The thing about "Shadowplay" is that it brilliantly pains a picture of living in both "furious" and "self doubt" mode concurrently.  The singer keeps walking back his accusations to wonder whether it's worse because he didn't pick up on certain signs.  Or, even worse:

Could I have been a better man, was I really all to blame?

Was it me that was the problem, was it me that dealt the pain?

In this particular case, the main purpose of that stanza is to show that the singer is still "in a trance, [held] by the shadowplay," so we're still closer to recrimination than real self-doubt, but the latter is important too, and he's still flailing for that illumination as the song ends.

Track Two:  "Lucky"

In contrast to "Shadowplay," "Lucky" is a straight ahead rock number, fitting its portrait of an ironically dubbed "lucky" working-class bloke who sounds like he'd flash peace signs while waging war in the disco, so to speak.  I think the issue is that the tone requires it ot be straight ahead, but that also means that the chorus starts to get annoying if you hear it too often.  That's probably why this wasn't the lead single and wasn't destined to get played in football stadiums the way Fish still sometimes kind of imagines - it's too heady to chant along to, while being too simple to be the stuff of endless repetition like in live versions that go on forever.  Destined to be a good song but not a great one.

Track Three:  "Just Good Friends"

Okay, this is different.  A haunting guitar leads the piece into some seriously vulnerable lyrics that sell the way "there's more at stake" the closer one gets to the object of affection.  Being in love with a good friend is way scarier than a crush is!  Great lyric-music synergy on the chorus, as the singer literally reaches out to the other character with his voice.  You can get your "Gentleman's Excuse Me" bullshit right out of here, because from my standpoint, "Just Good Friends" is what an actual nakedly vulnerable love song should sound like.  My particular highlight lyric here, although there are plenty to pick between, is:

Do we just play a game where we try to pretend
That all that's between us is all that's between us?
And all we can rely on is just being good friends?

Clever.  That guitar solo is just perfect, bursting out at the listener in its second half.  

I've spent way too much time trying to decide if there's a "best" version of the song.  Do I dive into the more melodic consistency in the album version with Fish on his own?  Or was this song really meant to be a full on duet, as in the alternate vision with Sam Brown, with two seaparate voices mutually tentatively straining towards each other?  I think since it's a four-verse song in the end I like the variety of having two singers attacking it a bit differently, and it especially sounds good when Sam takes over the song during the third chorus.  This was a highlight of the mostly acoustic Communion set from 2006 (with another soon to be ex as the female voice...) but that take doesn't have the guitar solo.  So, uh, hard choice.

Track Four:  "Favourite Stranger"

More intrigue and haunting guitar progressions with dueling vocals.  And another relationship song, except this time here the conceit is how little the two characters actually know each other, like really know.  I think there's just that one element missing here to put "Favourite Stranger" over the edge to being great; I tend to tune it out by the end even though I like the song.

FS is the only Internal Exile track, on any of its various editions, for which Micky Simmonds does not have a co-writing credit.

Track Five:  "Tongues"

Does the opening "a-woo-ah" vocalization finally give us something to rival "Incubus"'s "ooh-wah-ah?"  Well, I'll take them both.  Yet another track makes great use of harmonic chords - as I often say, if I had the musical words to describe exactly why my ears love the sound of the 
da-da-DA-DA-dum" string part that leads into the beginning of each lyric, I'd be a real music writer.  Against that ominous backdrop we get Fish in full vindictive rage mode spinning eloquent contempt with lines like "I question your morality; you question my reality."  Even not knowing that "Tongues" was inspired by a fight with his record company (in which they were talking past each other and making no sense to each other, hence "speaking in tongues"), I think I'd have pegged the song as thoroughly petty and mean spirited.  I like it that way.  

Track Six:  "Something In The Air"

I was rather surprised to realize that part of the reason I'd always thought of "Something In The Air" as one of those timeless songs that's always existed is because the version in my head is Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' version, and they of course can make anything sound timeless.  But as of 1991, the Petty version hadn't even been recorded yet.  Fish's version incorporating bagpipes and a dance beat sounds less removed from the equally wacky original by Thunderclap Newman.  Despite ditching the piano heroics, I think Internal Exile offers a good take.  The mix of groove and barely restrained edge in the guitar parts suits Fish's voice as he shares his coiled but tense warnings about what's coming.

Track Seven:  "Poet's Moon"

Another rocker, featuring one of the catchier choruses and one of the better post-chorus riffs on the record.  Not quite sure whether we're supposed to take the song at face value with its inspirational references to the power of art, as Fish casts himself among the "we" who're the "flowers in a storm."  It's possible that the frequent references to drink are meant to give everything a less pleasant undercurrent.  I kinda hope it's actually a happy song, because I just want to do better things when I hear an upbeat delivery of lyrics like

Under a poet's moon there are dreams in action
Prayers met and questions answered

As the world whirls in the darkness
I'm still staring at the skies

Staring at the skies, we're still staring at the skies

Under a poet's moon

I see no conceivable reason for "Poet's Moon" to have been left off of most previous releases of Internal Exile; glad to see it get its day in the, uh, sun, now.

Track Eight:  "Dear Friend"

Bit of a slower jaunt, framed as a letter to a friend.  Or metatextually perhaps to Fish's past self, as he does his best to embrace settling down with one family.  If one buys into gender stereotypes, there's a very male-centered narrative about a fork in life wherein the sort of guys who've been raising can take one of two basic paths - some get older and creepier without ever really growing, while some mellow with age and put the wild life behind them.

The song is nice enough.  I'm not wild about the seeming lyrical references to 'Sugar Mice" and "Lady Nina," since they seem to be trying to imbue the song with bigger-picture meaning that it hasn't really earned.

Track Nine:  "Credo"

I have to keep listening to "Credo" just to come up with something to say about it.  I still don't have much, given that the song is over six and a half minutes long.  Something about it sticks with me even while I'm tuning it out.  I mean, on the one hand, the tune just does one thing throughout its length and I've never paid attention to it throughout its whole run time.  On the other hand, I've never gotten enough of its single-word pre-chorus, no matter how many times I've listened to it.  Like, literally sitting in the car chanting "Credo!  Credo!"  I have it playing in the background as I type this, and I'm restraining myself from singing along.  Like a certain artist who has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone I've profiled in these posts might say, it ain't even gotta be deep, I guess.

Track Ten:  "Internal Exile"

Obviously this one had been kicking around since at least the Vigil days, and the lyrics and melody are unchanged from the unused tracks from that record.  I can see why the song stuck around.  As much as I of course despise the whole idea of incorporating Celtic folk into rock music, I really like the way throwing in a few folk instruments suits Fish's whole thing.  The song itself is a little more nakedly... well, I'm not even going to call it political or nationalistic, it just really seems to be about what it means to be Scottish in the 20th and 21st centuries.  I don't get to describe things as "rollicking" often enough, so I'll say it here - "Internal Exile" is a rollicking little number.  You have to be impressed at the way the track manages to cram in four verse/choruses into under five minutes, and still makes time for a big rousing fiddle solo (pnctuated by some really lively drumming) on the outro.

Track Eleven:  "Carnival Man"

Yeah, I don't really like this one.  I really don't need seven minutes of blather about "temp--TAY-shun."  Something about the sound has always made me bounce off of it hard.  After hanging on Fish's every word talking about his sense of isolation or his fights with EMI or his sense of national identity, I abruptly cannot relate at all to his story about how "you" can't resist the allure of whatever prostitution ring or whatever is being sold.  Really not.  Your circus really needed a more interesting song if you wanted me to give a shit about it.

Final thoughts:

Just for the record, the original tracklisting for Internal Exile was:

Shadowplay

Credo

Just Good Friends

Favourite Stranger

Lucky

Dear Friend

Tongues

Internal Exile

Something In The Air

Carnival Man (left off of some editions, but in my world of streaming it's always been the closer)

And I believe that there were a few releases in which "Poet's Moon" slipped in as track #10, before "Carnival Man," but most of the time it didn't make the album proper.  Until now!

Track order maybe plays a role, but not as much as one might think.  No matter which order one listens to the songs in, "Credo" is still a banger, "Lucky" still doesn't quite hit as hard as it wants to, "Tongues" is still a welcome jolt of energy, "Dear Friend" is still a little too placid, and so on.  "Credo" kind of benefits from being kept toward near the end, as a kind of statement encapsulating the Fish worldview and a bridge to "Internal Exile," I guess.  "Something In The Air," though, made more sense in its original role as the closer or near-closer; when you cover a song that familiar, you can't just dump it in the middle.

I kind of have in my head a thesis statement built around Internal Exile being a record full of a mess of different styles.  Fish himself decided he didn't like the original track order.  Nobody can agree on whether a few of the songs are even part of the album or not.  Half of my own comments above are about different versions of the songs here and maybe preferring those.  Based on all that, one might conclude that Internal Exile isn't quite finished.  Weird to think of it that way given that it'd been two years since Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors was recorded, but remember that it didn't come out for a year and Fish was touring it intensively before going back to the studio.  Maybe trying to get Fish to pump out records too quickly is a recipe for mediocrity*.

Yet I can't quite stand by that conclusion.  That's because when I go through the record track by track, I'm all "this is a banger, this one is pretty good, banger, I like this one pretty well too, banger, banger."  I'm not accusing the record of perfection or anything, but damn, lotta good songs.  I'm especially pleased with how well the incorporation of a few folky elements - especially the bagpipes/whistles and the female vocals - suits Fish.  He's developing a style as a solo artist that's uniquely hm, and I'm here for it.

Favor(u)ite track:  "Shadowplay"

Runner up:  "Internal Exile"

Least favorite track:  "Carnival Man"

Rating:  4/5

Definitive running list of records by Fish/Marillion that I have profiled so far, in order of what I have decided is unambiguously their quality 

1)  Clutching At Straws

2)  Misplaced Childhood

3)  Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors

4)  Internal Exile

5)  Fugazi

6)  Market Square Heroes (single)

7)  Script For A Jester’s Tear

I guess I have to write something about Songs From The Mirror, huh?  Well, whenever I get around to it!

*although that didn't stop the '80s version of Marillion from being prolific as all get out.