Clutching At Straws Cary NC

Clutching At Straws

Marillion

Sanctuary Records, 1987

REVIEW BY: Christopher Thelen

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 12/05/2000

After spending just over a year listening to Marillion's Misplaced Childhood and trying to decipher the story behindthe album, I decided that when it came time for me to review Clutching At Straws, the band's 1987 release (and laststudio album with vocalist Fish), I wasn't going to try andpsychoanalyze the disc. Instead, I was going to approach it basedsolely on the musical and lyrical content; any story line wouldhave to wait for when I actually had time to go over it like theZapruder film.

It has been suggested by at least one band member that maybe thesmartest thing Marillion could have done around this time was totake a break and let their sudden fame sink in. Clutching At Straws suggests that this might have been thebest path for them to take as well. While this is by no means a badalbum, it doesn't really build on the success that Misplaced Childhood brought them. Instead, this album seemsto try and tie up their entire career to that point - a move thatdoesn't work quite as well as the band would have hoped.

There are two outstanding performances on Clutching At Straws - one of them being the single "SugarMice," a track which is hauntingly beautiful and suggests thefragility that both Fish and his fellow band members felt at thatpoint in their careers. The other, surprisingly, is "Just For TheRecord," another song in which it seems like Fish is pouring outhis soul and all of his faults for all to scrutinize. It's a boldpiece of music, and one which is not quickly forgotten.

This all said, Marillion does two things on Clutching At Straws which are curious. The first is thatthey start building the album up as another constant piece - thatis, without segues between the songs. In a sense, this processseems to work (though, after Misplaced Childhood, it hardly seems original), and I couldhave easily accepted a second album in this vein. But after thefirst three songs, Clutching At Straws shifts gears into a regular album,complete with fadeouts. Why they dropped the consistency of thepiece after "That Time Of The Night (The Short Straw)" I don'tquite understand.