AN HOUR BEFORE IT'S DARK

An Hour Before It's Dark takes the song suite-based approach of their previous album, FEAR, and shifts it from that album's pastoral contemplation of an England bent on self-destruction to a contemplation of a world on the verge of darkness, but sensing some hope to come after the long night.

There's soulfulness, there's soaring moments harkening back to some of their early days (Steve Rothery's guitar solo on The Crow and the Nightingale, for example), there's sorrow, there's joy, and underlying it all it's Marillion with the quiet confidence of a band in a late-career renaissance. Why, listen to Maintenance Drugs and there's even a pinch of funk. Some of it sounds further from Marillion than they've ever gone before, some of it sounds like quintessential Marillion, but all of it sounds like it belongs together. That, folks, is a pretty serious achievement.