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Fish - Weltschmerz CD (album) cover

WELTSCHMERZ

Fish

 

Neo-Prog

3.91 | 159 ratings

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Warthur
Prog Reviewer
5 stars Fish's solo career has had more than its fair share of ups and downs, with a fractious relationship with the major labels nudging him into taking a more independent path from Suits onwards, and patchy finances dogging his homegrown endeavours. Nonetheless, his solo albums have always had something of interest to them, and a few have been outright brilliant - Sunsets On Empire being perhaps the first bona fide classic he produced after leaving Marillion, and A Feast of Consequences being a late-career masterpiece.

Now, however, the game is over. Weltschmerz finds Fish following up the career high point of Feast of Consequences by putting an end to his career - at least as far as making solo studio albums goes. The sole double studio album of his career, it's a capstone to over three decades of toil since his exit from Marillion and, unless his plans change unexpectedly, marks the end of an era.

It would have been embarrassing, then, if it had turned out to be a clunker - in fact, it's quite the opposite. With a brooding, melancholy atmosphere suggestive of the world-weariness that the title implies, the album's long compositions take us on epic emotional journeys, addressing regrets and, perhaps towards the end, showing just a bit of the anger that came forth on Market Square Heroes or Forgotten Sons back in those early Marillion says - a few glowing sparks among the ashes suggesting that the fire has not gone out yet, even if it might fall to others to carry it forwards.

In many ways it's lazy and annoying to compare Fish to Marillion, given the differing musical paths they have followed and their mutual struggles to overcome the gravity well of the four albums they did together. Nonetheless, it's heartening to hear both parties coming into this sort of late-career renaissance, and producing albums like Feast of Consequences, FEAR, Weltschmerz and An Hour Before It's Dark which can act almost as companion pieces to each other - not because they're imitating each other, but because they're looking at the same damaged state of the world and offering their thoughts. Still, if Fish's solo career had one task, it was to prove to the world that he had something of artistic merit to say independent of Marillion, and Weltschmerz was his very last chance to do that. I'd say he succeeded with flying colours.

Warthur | 5/5 |

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