VIGIL IN A WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

Any prog fan worth his salt would know that Fish was the frontman of neo-prog legends Marillion, and that he left after the fourth. Now it's one thing if you wanna say that Marillion's overrated. It's another thing to say that Marillion got better after Fish left, largely because they were willing to expand. I've gone as far as to say that Marillion were writing quite samey albums that largely followed a certain standard. But REAL boldness, is saying that Misplaced Childhood, the single most popular neo-prog album of all time, is too poppy to be neo-prog. Now I'm fairly well-versed in post-Fish Marillion, and how they were finally allowed to expand their sound into other territories. For Seasons End, that seriously helped. So I was quite surprised by the RYM genre-tagging of Fish's debut album, bearing a much more diverse set of tags than any of the Fish-era Marillion albums.

This album is extraordinarily wild. Vigil was an excellent neo-prog opener that shows you what you'd expect from the full Fish, collecting everything in the first four Marillion albums in a nine-minute epic. But I didn't expect new wave touches and mellow samba touches in the next two songs. Unfortunately, pair this with the adult contemporary single, A Gentleman's Excuse Me, it gets to the point where a "prog" tag is questionable. It seems that radio success is something Fish was quite worried about after Misplaced Childhood. He DID leave Marillion for monetary and legal reasons. And the best part? Most of these tracks are very catchy, even though that means they're also quite accessible. Songs like Family Business and State of Mindget you moving as much as they get you thinking about the style. In fact, during Vigil, I was thinking to myself, why the hell didn't Fish do stuff like this with Marillion? There's only one weak song, ther adult contemporary Gentleman's Excuse me. In stark contrast to everything else on the album, there's no rhythm in the instrumentation, and nothing weird or wild. Pop single.

Okay, so this went without progressive rock tendencies and may be closer to progressive pop for the long run, so I'm gonna say it: even though this is easily more neo-prog than Misplaced Childhood, I wouldn't call this prog rock, so no neo-prog tag. Prog pop? Sure. Pop rock? Yes. And why? Because it's blatantly obvious that this album, while exceptionally creative and consistent with a perfect flow, is a cashgrab. A really GOOD cashgrab. Creatively speaking, this album is much more well-handled than anything he did with Marillion, and maybe even better than Seasons End.

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