The album
seemed to play to the band's strengths, with a mixture of epics, snappy rock
songs, powerful ballads and emotive mid-paced tracks, though user polls have
rarely agreed on the best songs.
The album
is strongly personal in tone, with many glimpses into h's life, often in quite
uncomfortably intimate detail. The Invisible Man sees the singer as a
displaced soul in a world he know longer understands and in which he is
powerless to intervene. Marbles contains vignettes of h's life as a young lad
on a Doncaster housing estate. Genie, The Damage, You're Gone
and The Only Unforgivable Thing hint at relationship difficulties,
affairs and infidelities. By way of contrast, Neverland seems to be an
affirmation of the importance of her love and support from h to his (then)
wife.
Then
there are songs like Angelina, Drilling Holes and Ocean Cloud,
which seem less personal and unconnected from any grand theme but which are no
less effective for all that. All in all, this is a powerful collection of songs
that play to Marillion's collective and individual strengths. It was entirely
just that the singles charted and that this album finally started to get the
attention of a much wider audience.
Cover notes: The cover featured the half faces of graphics genius Carl Glover's niece Kezzie and nephew Jack morphed together, with marbles held over their irises, in a band across a black cover. On the campaign edition, there was a varnished marble over the top of this, only visible when it caught the light. This simple image was used in much the same way as the equally iconic Brave artwork ten years before, with a cohesive and instantly recognisable brand identity across all of the singles and the album, along with the marble icon.
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