SCRIPT FOR A JESTER'S TEAR

In the mid 90's, I thought prog was all but dead (how wrong I was). Imagine my surprise to find an album from 1983 that was a genuine prog album! Well, "prog" as the genre that it, as there is nothing "progressive" about this album, even in 1983. If you mixed Gabriel Genesis with The Wall era Pink Floyd, you have a pretty good idea of what this sounds like. To be fair, Fish is a fairly unique singer and I think his resemblance (vocally) to Peter Gabriel is minor, at best. Still, the music is structrured very similarly to Genesis' big numbers and it is easy to make the comparison. As an ironic aside, I once was playing Selling England for a friend of mine who had never heard it, and as soon as Gabriel sang the opening line my friend asked, "Is this Marillion?". I then had to explain that Genesis came first, so it was Marillion who sounded like them, not the other way around. In any case, the comparison is totally valid, even if this music is considerably more modern in production and execution (and, as we all know, Grendel uses a remarkably similar song structure to Supper's Ready, so the influence of Genesis on Marillion was obviously quite strong at the time).

But from a purely critical standpoint, this is a good album. I couldn't stop listening to it back then, being a big fan of PG Genesis. And it has its own charm, and really doesn't sound like a copycat of Genesis music in the end. No prog fan should go without hearing this album, that much is for certain. It was a seminal moment in prog history, the beginning of the "second wave" (though people who were there in England at the time tell me that Pallas was more popular and was the one that everyone thought would have a big break through), and for that alone it deserves to be heard by every self respecting prog head. I give it only 3.5 or so personally, but I think for historical reasons it deserves the extra half star.

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