Musical meanderings

[dvandom]

One of the things I really miss about Columbus was the vibrant music store scene in the off-campus strip of High Street. There's really nothing equivalent here at Kansas State...there's one aggressively indie shop (Sisters of Sound), the rest is major corporate chain stuff (Best Buy, CD Exchange, etc). No weird midlist, and the biggest used CD store is Hastings (regional chain). As a result, I no longer have a place to just go and poke about for new stuff by the semi-obscure acts I like, and I have to actively seek it out instead. If I forget about a group, they may stay forgotten for years.

Recently, I've gone hunting about to catch up on some of my old favorites, hitting Amazon and Deepdiscount.com for CDs. So far, I've gotten more or less caught up on Shonen Knife and Marillion, and just today ordered a couple more discs from Fish (Derek Dick), although one of 'em is a 1996 disc, so that may not really count. :)

Shonen Knife, despite rotating through members like a perky punk chick version of Menudo, has weathered the years pretty well. I like Genki Shock and Heavy Songs as well as anything else of theirs, and I'm hoping Candy Rock gets a domestic release soon (I don't like 'em enough to drop $40 on an import).

On the other hand, I really need to remind myself in the future not to buy any more Marillion. Oh, Marbles wasn't bad or anything. But it wasn't much of anything at all. And, thinking back, I really can't remember anything of theirs since Six of One...I didn't even remember an entire album (Marillion.com) of theirs that I owned until I double checked this morning. That's four albums I own (Brave, Anorakonophobia, Marillion.com, Marbles...actually, I think I have a fifth that I can't recall even now!) which produced nothing memorable. Not even memorable enough to remember to stop buying, apparently. Heck, when I ordered Marbles, I thought at the time I only owned three post-Fish albums (Six of One, Brave, Anoraknophobia).

Derek "Fish" Dick left Marillion around 1990, when I was still in college and still working on picking up the Marillion back catalog. From what I've heard, it was a pretty "normal" pattern: Fish was a diva who felt the rest of the band was holding him back, the rest of the band thought he was a preening asshole and were glad to see him go. It strikes me that there's something archetypical here, though, in what happened next.

Fish's Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors was fantastic. He'd probably been saving up his best stuff for a couple of years before the break with Marillion, or maybe he really was being held back by them. Internal Exile was okay, but seemed to be drifting away. I'm re-listening to Raingods with Zippos now, because it fell into the same memory black hole as later Marillion stuff...it's decent, but nothing great so far.

Marillion's "Six of One" was about half Fish-era material and half new, hence the name. But the new material was very good, enough to give me hope for the group. But then there was a slide into pleasant mediocrity.

Marillion wasn't holding Fish back so much as holding him down. Keeping him anchored to reality enough to produce material that was both good and would appeal to the fans. Without them, he's drifted off into artistic weirdness like a lot of solo split-offs (see, for instance, Peter Gabriel). And while Fish may have annoyed the rest of the band, he was their power source, the angry celtic rock god who gave Marillion its energy. With him gone, they've become mellow balladeers...technically proficient, but lacking in oomph. Together, they were a great, if uneasy, synergy. Apart, after the intial rush of relief, they seem to be far less than they were.

Anyway, I've ordered Sunset on Empire (1996), which is pre-Raingods and might still be grounded a bit (the title song seems to me to be political in nature). I also ordered Bouillabase, a "greatest hits" sort of collection by Fish, which includes nearly a dozen songs from albums I don't own among the score or so of pieces. We'll see how things were working for him as of 2005 when that came out.

Comments

[foomf.livejournal.com]

http://cdbaby.com/

If the artist you like is not in there, send them there.

Ah, Columbus

[dreadpirate.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I still miss Singing Dog records and Magnolia Thunderpussy on High Street.

Of course, now that I'm near Berkeley, I'm getting spoiled by Amoeba and Rasputin...

As for my favorite college bands, it's been a loooong time since I heard anything good from They Might Be Giants, the Samples or Rush.

Damn, I'm old. =(

Re: Ah, Columbus

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

TMBG I have been keeping up on, and I continue to like their new stuff as it comes out.