Published on Dec 5, 2000
After spending just over a year listening to Marillion’s
Misplaced Childhood and trying to decipher the story behind
the album, I decided that when it came time for me to review
Clutching At Straws, the band’s 1987 release (and last
studio album with vocalist Fish), I wasn’t going to try and
psychoanalyze the disc. Instead, I was going to approach it based
solely on the musical and lyrical content; any story line would
have to wait for when I actually had time to go over it like the
Zapruder film.
It has been suggested by at least one band member that maybe the
smartest thing Marillion could have done around this time was to
take a break and let their sudden fame sink in.
Clutching At Straws suggests that this might have been the
best path for them to take as well. While this is by no means a bad
album, it doesn’t really build on the success that
Misplaced Childhood brought them. Instead, this album seems
to try and tie up their entire career to that point – a move that
doesn’t work quite as well as the band would have hoped.
There are two outstanding performances on
Clutching At Straws – one of them being the single “Sugar
Mice,” a track which is hauntingly beautiful and suggests the
fragility that both Fish and his fellow band members felt at that
point in their careers. The other, surprisingly, is “Just For The
Record,” another song in which it seems like Fish is pouring out
his soul and all of his faults for all to scrutinize. It’s a bold
piece of music, and one which is not quickly forgotten.
This all said, Marillion does two things on
Clutching At Straws which are curious. The first is that
they start building the album up as another constant piece – that
is, without segues between the songs. In a sense, this process
seems to work (though, after
Misplaced Childhood, it hardly seems original), and I could
have easily accepted a second album in this vein. But after the
first three songs,
Clutching At Straws shifts gears into a regular album,
complete with fadeouts. Why they dropped the consistency of the
piece after “That Time Of The Night (The Short Straw)” I don’t
quite understand.
The second thing that seems to unravel this work is that
Marillion takes a look backwards in terms of their songwriting.
“Incommunicado,” one of the singles from this disc, occasionally
smacks of “Market Square Heroes” or “Assassing”. Backpedaling is
not something that Marillion has done a lot of throughout their
career, and listening to this example shows why. Simply put, it
doesn’t work for them.
Clutching At Straws sometimes feels like Marillion is trying
to continue the story of
Misplaced Childhood where it left off, only the band members
are writing the story as the album progresses. As tracks like
“White Russian” and “Torch Song” prove, sometimes this process
ain’t pretty.
The reissue of this album comes with a bonus disc of material –
and, despite the warning placed early in the liner notes, the
overall sound of much of the unreleased material is quite good
(save for two songs, and these are just a little rough).
Regrettably, these tracks really don’t bring much to the table,
though I do like the extended version of “Going Under,” and it’s
nice to hear a rough version of “Sugar Mice In The Rain”.
One complaint, though: why bother burying a bonus track that can
only be unlocked by answering an online questionnaire – and then
make that key to unlock the track good only on the PC that you took
the questionnaire from? Waste of time, gang – and it’s not like the
rock version of “Warm Wet Circles” is a track you can’t live
without. (We’ll encounter this one more time when we get to the
review of
Afraid Of Sunlight.)
Clutching At Straws seems to be Marillion’s attempt to
follow up an album that defies being followed up. In retrospect, it
might have been better for the band to continue doing things their
own way instead of trying to please the record company. Fish would
bid adieu to the band, though he’d be captured on tape with them
one more time on
The Thieving Magpie… but that’s another review for another
day.