MISPLACED CHILDHOOD

Misplaced Childhood is album about about loss: loss of childhood, of innocence, and of love; it is an album about coming to terms with the world as it is. In engaging with the world as it is the album finds drama and substance in the everyday, whether a train waiting in a siding, a prostitute working in a small French town or Friday night drinking rituals.

This is the album on which the creative tensions within Fish-era Marillion produced a magical work of art. The album has a fragmentary quality, but the genius is that the combined effect of those fragments is a record dripping with atmosphere, emotion and poetry. For me the highlights are the most fragmentary tracks, Bitter Suite and Blind Curve.

If there's weakness it's that for me the final two songs on the album, in which we supposedly find resolution and absolution, don't really convince. Somehow it seems to me that this album shouldn't really end in solution, but in... something different, less certain.

Nevertheless, this is a real masterpiece of prog rock, an album to return to again and again, to discover new dimensions and new depths. An essential addition to any prog rock collection.