INTERNAL EXILE

It's hard to get as excited about Fish's second album, Internal Exile, as one might like - after all, in the liner notes found on some CD reissues he all but acknowledges that it isn't his strongest work when considered as an album. There's undeniably solid songs here - Credo quickly became a lynchpin of his live set, for instance - but things don't hang together quite as well as on Vigil In a Wilderness of Mirrors.

To an extent, this isn't Fish's fault: 1990 and early 1991 had been a rough time for him. EMI had insisted on holding off on the release of Vigil, so as not to compete head to head with Marillion, which in practice meant that Fish lost a lot of momentum, and he badly overestimated the returns on the Vigil tour and ended up out of pocket. This prompted a contract dispute with EMI, when Fish felt they weren't offering him enough of an advance on the recording, and this quickly turned into a legal battle which would see the end of his working relationship with the label he'd been with since Marillion signed back in 1982, and would result in him signing to Polydor.

There were plenty of reasons, then, for Fish and his band to be somewhat off their game when they settled down to record this - but no matter how good the reasons are, the end result is still an album which feels a bit disjointed. Part of this feels like a production issue - the album was among the first material recorded in Fish's home studio, and a nervous Polydor sent Chris Kimsey, producer of Misplaced Childhood, along to make sure everything came out. The end result risks sounding over-slick and over-orchestrated at points, with Fish's voice occasionally being obscured in the mix by over-loud backing. Sure, Credo might have become a live favourite, but the initial pass here could do with a bit less of a heavy hand.

In addition, Fish and his band were incorporating aspects of Celtic folk music into the album, and it feels like a more folk-friendly production (rather one trying to fit everything in a straight-ahead radio-friendly rock mode) might have teased the better aspects of the sounds out.

It's a shame that the album sounds so disjointed, because thematically there's a strong concept here - Fish this time considering his relationship with his homeland of Scotland and the possibilities of Scottish independence, perhaps a bit of a fringe political view at the time but an idea whose time may well have come, given that pro-independence parties seem to have had a lock on the Scottish Parliament for successive elections and support for freedom from the clumsy hand of Tory-dominated Westminster is on the increase.

Does this also mean it's time to reappraise Internal Exile? I think perhaps it is. As with Vigil, it's certainly a step or two closer to mainline classic rock than Marillion ever were, though with Marillion themselves taking on their own set of broader influences from outside the prog world on Holidays In Eden this is perhaps all to the good, both sides of the divorce establishing some clear water between their current work and their old, as well as between each others' approach.

Perhaps the difference is that whilst EMI seem to have let Marillion continue their development organically (at least at this stage of the proceedings), Chris Kimsey's production on the album seems to be trying to keep Fish in a 1980s classic rock mode, and the album to me is at its best when a composition comes up which self-evidently can't be nudged in that direction, prompting the production to ease its grip a little.

The opening three songs all make me think "nice song, would be nice to hear it with different production", but my appreciation of the album perks up with Favourite Stranger, which has a musical backing which manages the same trick of somehow being laid-back and mellow but at the same time just a little uneasy that trip-hop was starting to perfect as its own at the same time. As a song, it might not be the best, but it does mark a moment where the production actually assists the music and improves on it. Then Lucky comes along, a really solid and stirring song where again the production is actually helpful, and the album really starts to soar.

It took a while for Internal Exile to grow on me, because I came to Fish through his work in Marillion and through some of his more progressively-inclined solo albums. Here, he's moving away from all that, and it seems evident that he's flirting with the idea of becoming a Celtic folk-tinged singer-songwriter (with a few nods to his prog past) rather than a more traditional rock frontman. Once I wisened up and realised that was the approach he was taking, I was able to appreciate the album much better - but the production on the early numbers doesn't set you up to expect that, which can be a stumbling block.

Call it three and a half stars, and dock half a star or so if you aren't interested in Fish taking a less proggy approach than typical for him.