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Marillion - Fugazi CD (album) cover

FUGAZI

Marillion

 

Neo-Prog

4.00 | 1523 ratings

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Rune2000
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
3 stars When Marillion tried writing more accessible material we got a mixed bag which I always baffled me considering the high quality material featured on the three other Fish-era releases.

I guess it was understandable that Marillion couldn't just do a Script For A Jester's Tear Part 2 with their sophomore release and so they combined their progressive tendencies with some commercially oriented material on Fugazi. Assassing and Punch And Judy might have really made the already established fan-base scratch their heads in confusion but luckily this new direction wouldn't last for too long.

Jigsaw is the first commercially oriented experiment that actually make me smile in delight. The music here starts off slow and quiet building up to a highly dramatic delivery of the chorus that almost punches the listened in the stomach, something that Punch And Judy was going for but didn't really manage to achieve. Many people seem to blame the change of direction of Holidays In Eden on Steve Hogarth but just compare Jigsaw to Dry Land and you'll see that their styles are quite similar.

I would like to state that I never really cared much for the next part of the album where I usually can't tell the diffidence between Emerald Lies, She Chameleon and Incubus. It's not that the songs don't have their own unique approaches but the results here are far from the highlights featured on Script For A Jester's Tear. I usually consider these three songs to be closely related to the underdeveloped track Boats Down From The Candy from Market Square Heroes EP. All the right elements like a strong lead melody, memorable lyric delivery and climactic sections are here but they just don't work as complete compositions.

This is of course where this album's title-track actually manages to deliver the goods and prove that these elements can in fact work very well if they are put in just the right order! Eventually things would get a lot better with the next release and Fugazi would be considered a slight transitional misstep where Marillion were still developing their own unique sound. A good, but non-essential album that I would recommend listening to after the three other Fish-era Marillion albums.

***** star songs: Jigsaw (6:50) Fugazi (8:13)

**** star songs: Punch And Judy (3:21) Emerald Lies (5:09) She Chameleon (6:53)

*** star songs: Assassing (7:02) Incubus (8:30)

Rune2000 | 3/5 |

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