Beekstraat 1 - B-2640 Mortsel - Belgium

MARILLION – Somewhere Else

Release

Style

Website

Contact

Playing Time

Cat. N°

Review by

Rating

Reviewing a Marillion album isn’t easy. More than any other band, you have to listen to their music quite a lot to really start appreciating it.
If I had written this review after 3 auditions, I would have said that there wasn’t a lot of variation on this “Somewhere Else” and that every track sounded a bit like another track out of their discography. But I knew better, so I kept listening and the album became better every time.

Making a follow up to “Marbles” wasn’t an easy task and they didn’t succeed completely. But it has become a good Marillion album. Maybe it sounds a bit too much as a Hogarth solo album, because he is singing a lot and there aren’t that many solos. But I’m not really complaining because I always liked his voice a lot. Just listen to the title track and enjoy his enormous reach, there aren’t many male vocalists that can sing that high. Rothery isn’t playing a lot of solos but there are a few great ones and sometimes he plays awesome fill-ins, like on the title track “Somewhere Else”. Mosley delivers an awesome performance, as usual, but he’s more in front than on “Marbles”. Only Mark Kelly stays too much in the background, only creating soundscapes, without any solo performance, although every listening reveals new sounds and little keyboard additions.

The first half of the CD is the more commercial part, starting off with “The Other Half”, a typical Marillion track with a great melody and an awesome Rothery solo at the end.
“See it like a Baby” is the first single they released and is meant to reach the charts, as they did with a track or two from “Marbles”. “Thank you, whoever you are” is a ballad which opens with the piano and grows to a climax in the choruses.
“Most Toys”, luckily lasts less than three minutes, because, in my opinion, it’s really superfluous, although it’s the only real up-tempo track on the CD.

My favourite songs have a bit the same structure. First there’s the title track, which starts quiet, with great Rothery interventions and slowly builds up to an explosion of old fashioned Marillion music. The same can be said of the next track “A Voice from the Past” which also contains another Rothery special.

But then from track seven on, the music gets laid back, relaxed, quiet and this second half is the difficult part of “Somewhere Else”, the part that slowly grows on you, but you need a lot of patience and I don’t know if everybody will have enough patience to give this the chance it deserves.

Maybe I have to invent a new proverb for this album: “Not every gem is a marble!”, but who cares, if you like it? And I do!!.

Musicians

Steve Hogarth: Vocals
Steve Rothery: Guitars
Pete Trewavas: Bass
Mark Kelly: Keyboards
Ian Mosley: Drums

1. The Other Half (4:23)
2. See It Like A Baby (4:32)
3. Thank You Whoever You Are (4:51)
4. Most Toys (2:48)
5. Somewhere Else (7:50)
6. A Voice From The Past (6:21)
7. No Such Thing (3:58)
8. The Wound (7:17)
9. The Last Century For Man (5:51)
10. Faith (4:10)

Website in order to promote progressive rock to a broader audience in Flanders but also in the entire world. No part from this website may be used in any other publication whether in print or on the world wide web without the editor's consent - all material is exclusive to Prog-Nose and copyright protected.

Last updated: 20 mei 2007 .
All rights reserved. Copyright © Prog-Nose 30:05:2001.