SEASONS END

Marillion´s first post Fish album was a shock for most fans. Released in 1989 it showed the band taking a more pop/alternative turn, leaving much of their prog roots behind. At the time I hated the record. It sounded to me like nothing Marillion has done before. It looked like they decided to be another AOR band like, say, Foreigner. A few months later Fish released his solo effort, the brilliant Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors, which sounded much more like Marillion than Marillion in Seasons End. I was so disgusted I sold the LP a couple of months after I bought it. I gave up upon Marillion for many years after that. The band was finished for me since Clutching At Straws

Things would remain the same until 1997, when a friend of mine put a cassette recording of Marillion´s Made Again live album during a car conversation. I was impressed by some of the stuff and decided to give the band another shot. That brought me back, in the end, to Seasons End. By the new millennium I was able to see Marillion with Steve Hogarth as entire new band. If you don´t compare their earlier work and you´re not a pop music hater, then you can enjoy it. I did, at least in parts.

In fact, I found the record to be very good, specially what was the vinyl's first side: King Of Sunset Town, the beautiful ballad Easter, the rocking Uninvited Guest and, specially, the title track (one of the only two real prog songs in the album). Things got a little worse by the second side: Halloway Girl is a weak pop song and Berlin has that alternative/pop structure that goes nowhere (unfortunately it showed the path Marillion would follow in the next years), but the very worst is Hooks In You, a Bon Jovi pastiche hard rock, one of the few Marillion songs I can´t stand hearing it even today (and, no, I don´t hate Bon Jovi!). Fortunately, the last track is The Space, a fantastic prog piece that starts slowly, building up to a great climax, showing off Hoggarth´s best vocal performance to this day. Great tune!

So, I found this record not to be the crap I once called it, neither the essential masterpiece few (very few) praise. It has some very fine songs, at least two of them excellent, but, please, just don´t compare Seasons End to any Fish era CD. From then on Marillion became a completely different band (I heard they even considered a change of name at the time) and things would never be the same again, like it or not. I rate this record now 3,5 stars.