That wasn’t the case on, say, Brave (1994), probably the best Hogarth-era Marillion album. His voice is a powerful instrument – comparable in its huskiness to Peter Gabriel’s and the late David Longdon’s – but it occasionally runs across or ignores the music, or vice versa, as if they are competing for attention. Part of the problem is Hogarth’s strident rendering of his often arrythmic lyrics. ![]() Disconcertingly, the longer numbers seem haphazardly structured, to the extent that they’re disjointed rather than the product of inspired jamming. This album's six main songs (another is merely a fragment) are not exactly tuneless, but the melodies are buried so deep in Marillion's intricate clamour they’re all but indiscernible. Fuck Everybody and Run (F E A R) (2016), their last album of new material, was melancholy, and at times bleak, but it was comparatively dynamic in its songcraft. The claim in a press release that An Hour Before It's Dark is one of the most upbeat albums of Marillion’s career doesn’t preserve it from turgidness. “Sierra Leone” asks what if the miner (a 16-year-old orphan) who unearthed the third largest diamond found in the West African country had regarded it as a non-marketable gift from God (rather than raise financial expectations for his community and himself that would become hard to fulfil)? Who has the moral and spiritual fibre to hide such a gift? The words are well-meaning they’re not rock ‘n’ roll. He sings about the multivalence of embraces, which can kill, betray, heal. He sings that angels aren’t found on church walls but in hospital wards. He urges us to forsake luxury to save the planet. ![]() The record addresses subjects like climate change, the pandemic and materialism with lyrics by Hogarth that are often oblique and too frequently unctuous.
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