This Strange Engine was an end and a beginning for Marillion. Dumped by longtime label EMI after “disappointing” sales of previous album Afraid Of Sunlight – just the 400,000 copies – they were forced to downscale drastically, signing to independent Raw Power and watching as the needle hovered close to the financial danger zone.
But it was also the album that led to a pioneering fan-funded US tour, which itself mutated into the crowdfunding model that allowed Marillion to thrive and prosper.
On its original release in 1997, Marillion’s ninth album was dismissed in some quarters of their fanbase as too poppy, too lightweight, too lacking in the prog edge that had defined them. That wasn’t inaccurate, but no Marillion album has grown in stature like this one.
Time and subsequent releases have reframed it as a pivotal album musically and historically. More more than 25 years on, This Strange Engine stands as an elegant outlier in their back catalogue.
This impressive box set – four CDs, a Blu-ray, plus colourful liner notes from Marillion biographer Rich Wilson, housed in a compact package that sits nicely on the shelf next to previous reissues – does a fantastic job of not only re-presenting This Strange Engine for consideration, but contextualising it too.
Work-in-progress versions of tracks show the sometimes tortuous nature of Marillion’s writing process
The remixed original album features some absolute keepers, most notably Man Of A Thousand Faces, with some tasty acoustic guitar from Steve Rothery and an enigmatic lyric courtesy of collaborator John Helmer; plus the eternal Estonia, a moving treatise on loss inspired by singer Steve Hogarth’s chance meeting with a survivor of the 1994 ferry disaster than killed more than 800 people.
Hope For The Future’s odd blues-calypso mashup had initially struck a grating note, but time has lent it a curiosity value – it’s not as bad as some members of the band think it is (and nowhere near as awful as Afraid Of Sunlight’s Cannibal Surf Babe).
As with previous reissues, it’s the audio and visual extras that add value and interest. Work-in-progress versions of tracks are included on the Blu-ray, showing the sometimes tortuous nature of Marillion’s writing process. A live recording of a gig in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1997 is fine, but a bootleg film of show in Utrecht the same year is pure gold – the perfect snapshot of a band defying the odds.
A documentary adds further context and detail (An Accidental Man is apparently the only Marillion song Peter Gabriel likes). As good as it is, this reissue is unlikely to push This Strange Engine up the ‘Greatest Marillion Albums’ rankings. What it does is reinforce just how quietly important it really was.
This Strange Engine Deluxe Edition is on sale now via earMusic.
