BEAUTIFUL

I'll do an exception and review a single (only because of the words not reviewed and the fact that I once bought this for an euro or so; I generally see CD-singles as irritating useless objects, compared to full- length CD's).

'Beautiful' is the radio-friendly wannabe-hit from Afraid of Sunlight album. It's not that bad as a happy- natured pop song, ie. if you compare it to songs by... errr, whatever mediocre mainstream bands in the fame game, but as a MARILLION song it's below standards and guaranteed to bore you in a while. It is also too common/unoriginal pop song to win new listeners for the band, I guess.

'Live Forever' was a *new* song for a Marillionist, and as such the sole reason why I bothered to get the single at all. It was interesting enough. Simple tongue-in-cheek lyrics about the wish to live forever, and some funny doodling with keyboard sounds. The track has its charm but it wears out with repeated listenings. If MARILLION compiled B'Sides Themselves pt. 2 it wouldn't be very good album if the artistic quality of the songs were up to this level (so lower than say 'Three Boats Down from the Candy', 'Cinderella Search' etc, not to speak of the epic 'Grendel' which also was on B'Sides Themselves).

Finally this CD-single has two demos, 'The Great Escape' and 'Hard As Love' of Brave (1993), the previous fantastic studio album. The first one I like; it is one of the album's highlights (the climax towards the end) but the harder straight rock song 'Hard As Love' is less up to my taste. Judged as demos these takes are interesting because, while the sonic quality is relatively good for demos, the songs were not quite finished at this point: one hears how the magnificent album gradually took shape.

Don't know if these tracks have been included on some full-length release of MARILLION or not, but the two-star rating with the words Collectors/ fans only is valid in both cases.