MARBLES ON THE ROAD

This is a very nice, classy DVD that I enjoyed a lot more than I expected. Marbles is a pretty good album, and certainly the band's best in ten years, but I wondered how the whole thing would translate live. In fact, I enjoyed these live renditions more than the studio ones. The band plays with fire and passion, particularly Steve Rothery, who throws in a lot of nifty Gilmourisms on lead guitar. The Marbles interludes fit in well and seem more like real songs than just filler atmospheres than they did on the CD. The production values are very high, and the show is very well shot with lots of camera angles and expensive looking swoops over the crowd, which is a typically infatuated Marillion audience, belting out the words and gazing adoring at H, their hero. This is the first time I've seen Hogarth at work live, and he takes some getting used to. He is in fine voice, but his hyper-dramatic expressions and gestures are a little distracting at first. Nevertheless, he is certainly a dynamic performer who holds your attention and does not come across as insincere. I also really enjoyed the intense encore performance of "Living With the Big Lie" from Brave. Marillion enthusiasts will already have this DVD, but if you enjoyed Marbles at all, this reasonably priced DVD is a good pickup. Caveat: The version I acquired does not have the second disk, which is a shame, because I'd have loved to get that version of "The Great Escape".