So I promised my friend Mike that when I got around to reviewing Inferno, I’d do it spoiler-free.

Mike is responsible for rekindling my irrational obsession with Doctor Who. He has an admiration for Tom Baker, the fourth and most famous Doctor, but hasn’t seen much before Baker’s run. I’ve been keeping him up to speed on my travels through the early years of Who, and Inferno is one he wants to watch. So I’ll try to keep my promise, but it’ll be tough.

Inferno is Jon Pertwee’s fourth story as the Doctor, and though he got off to a shaky start with Spearhead from Space, this story is proof that the new team found their footing quickly. Pertwee’s first season was dominated by seven-part stories, each lasting nearly three hours, and while you’d think a seven-parter would be intolerably padded, Inferno moves like a bullet. Sure, the cliffhangers are largely manufactured – you have to end each episode with a shock, after all – but this story has a mood of inescapable doom that I’ve never seen on this show before, and it’s marvelously effective.

Of course, I’m grading on a sliding scale – this is Doctor Who, after all. The effects are cheesy, the monster makeup is lousy, the dialogue is nowhere near as good as you’d expect nowadays, and compared to an episode of Lost, the whole thing looks remarkably cheap and staged. If you’re going to be a Doctor Who fan, you just have to deal with all of that. And if you’re able to look past it, Inferno is a splendid, foreboding story, one of the best I’ve seen since I started collecting these DVDs.

What’s it about? Well, scratching the surface, the Doctor is called in as a scientific advisor on a radical project to find new energy sources – a team of scientists is trying to drill past the Earth’s crust and tap into the superheated gases below. The Doc is still trapped on Earth, exiled there by the Time Lords at the end of Patrick Troughton’s run, so our hero is also hoping to use the project’s power source to juice up his time-and-space machine and get the hell out of there.

Things start to go wrong, of course. There’s a green slime that turns people into werewolves, and there’s a madman in charge of the project who ignores safety warnings. All pretty standard stuff for this show, with the Doctor dispensing sage-like advice and the idiot humans refusing to listen until it’s too late. This could have made for a dreadful seven-parter, had it continued down that path.

But then, at the end of the second episode, something happens that sets the story on its ear. And from then on, it’s awesome. I wish I could tell you more. Let’s just say that there’s a sense of palpable danger in the middle four episodes, and the writers take it all the way. It’s a showcase for Nicholas Courtney, as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and for Caroline John, in her final appearance as Liz Shaw.

Inferno is really just a dynamite, crackling story, one of the finest Doctor Who tales I’ve seen. It’s so gripping that I don’t mind how crappy it looks – the original videotapes are gone, and though it exists on black-and-white film, the restoration team rightly decided to go with color videotape recovered from Canada. Unfortunately, after standards conversion and decades of decay, the tapes weren’t in great shape, and the final DVD result is much less sharp than your average Doctor Who release. It’s not a lot better than a VHS tape, frankly, but it’s still clear, and the sound is crisp, and it’s better to have it in this condition than not have it at all.

There are four subsequent Pertwee stories available on DVD in America. (Those lucky Brits already have The Time Warrior too.) I think I may skip the next one, The Claws of Axos, simply because I’m itching to review The Three Doctors, and Axos just isn’t very good. But it is the only appearance on DVD so far of Roger Delgado as the Master, and so it bears a mention, if not a full review.

The Master is a renegade Time Lord introduced in season eight (in every story of season eight, in fact), and he would return to plague the Doctor throughout the series. Roger Delgado played the part first, with a devilish mix of style and cunning, and in Axos, he steals every scene he’s in. Delgado was killed in a car accident in June of 1973, but the Master lived on, later played by Geoffrey Beevers and the late Anthony Ainley. A new Master, played by John Simm, showed up at the end of the third season of the new series as well, continuing the legacy.

The rest of The Claws of Axos is a bit of a mess, sadly, with a poorly-thought-out plot and even poorer effects. But it’s the last bump in the road, as far as the six available Pertwee stories. We’ll get to The Three Doctors next week, but let me just say in advance that it’s a riot, a warm and funny tribute to the show’s first 10 years, with the added bittersweet tinge of William Hartnell’s final performance. It may be my favorite Doctor Who story so far, and I can’t wait to write about it.

* * * * *

I honestly didn’t expect to hear The Last Sucker so soon.

I knew it was coming. Shortly after releasing last year’s incendiary Rio Grande Blood, Ministry mastermind Al Jourgensen announced there would be one more album, and that would be it. The final record would complete Jourgensen’s “George Bush is an insane, dangerous bastard” trilogy, and then, in Big Al’s words, Ministry and Bush would “ride off into the sunset together.”

So it would seem that The Last Sucker is about a year too early to offer any kind of definitive summary of Junior’s time in office. It’s also clearly not designed to influence the 2008 elections – it is, like the previous two albums, fixated on Bush and his administration, and thanks to the merciful gods of term limits, the Texas twit can’t run again. This isn’t an album about 2008, it’s about 2007, and what it feels like to live in King Bush’s America right now.

Of course, the idea that Bush is an insane, dangerous bastard has become much more accepted since Jourgensen began his trilogy with Houses of the Mole in 2004. So this time, Jourgensen has focused on the Iraq war, painting Bush as a bloodthirsty religious nut, determined to bring about Armageddon. The Last Sucker is an angry, violent, nearly relentless album, but given this is supposed to be the final Ministry disc, what else would you expect? Jourgensen unloads with both barrels, offering no analysis, only unfiltered rage at the state of the world.

In some ways, it’s the perfect last Ministry album. The front cover is a masterpiece, a shifting hologram that superimposes a slithering reptile over the face of King Bush II. Open up the sleeve, and you’ll find a pop-up parody of DaVinci’s The Last Supper, with Jourgensen as Jesus and half the members of Bush’s cabinet as the apostles. (I didn’t get the title pun until I saw the pop-up artwork. I’m slow.) The lyrics are vengeful, yet at times surprisingly powerful: the tale of a haunted soldier destroyed by Iraq in “Life is Good” is, at least for Ministry, somewhat deep.

Of course, one song later, he’s calling Dick Cheney the son of Satan, and meaning it. So take all previous claims of lyrical depth with a grain of salt.

But perhaps it’s just me – I was expecting the final album from a band known for high-speed industrial metal noise to be, well… faster and noisier. The first five tracks are all mid-tempo crushers, and while the words are apocalyptically angry, the music just kind of chugs along without matching their fury. It’s good stuff, and certainly leagues better than the last time Jourgensen tried to slow things down (Filth Pig and Dark Side of the Spoon, two of the worst Ministry albums), but it’s not the venomous explosion I was hoping for.

Thankfully, things pick up with “No Glory,” the sixth track. It starts off all sleaze-metal, but before too long it’s rocketing forward, drum machine set on “liquefy.” The mechanical-sounding guitars are amazing here, as always – it’s incredibly difficult to play organic instruments along with a computer, since the machine will never screw up. The furious tempo thankfully doesn’t come back down – “Death and Destruction” is a whirlwind of shrapnel, framing one of Bush’s arrogant giggles as the most satanic sound on Earth, and even a cover of “Roadhouse Blues” doesn’t derail the proceedings, as it’s almost entirely unrecognizable.

The record ends with a two-part, 15-minute powerhouse called “End of Days,” bringing to a close Ministry’s 25-year career. (Or so Jourgensen says…) How do you close out your life’s work? Jourgensen does it by stepping aside, and letting the final words on the final Ministry album come from President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The second part of “End of Days” includes a lengthy sample from Eisenhower’s last speech as president, delivered on January 17, 1961, in which he warned against the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” – basically, the machines and money of war.

For three albums now, Al’s been trying to make this point, connecting Cheney and Halliburton to the war in Iraq and charging Bush with profiteering and empire-building. But in the end, Eisenhower’s speech drives the point home better than anything Jourgensen could have written. The former president explains the uneasy relationship of war and profit, uses his famous phrase, and then says this:

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

If there’s a better note for Ministry to go out on, I can’t think of it. We have not been an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, and the military-industrial complex has trampled all over our peaceful methods and goals. Security and liberty have not prospered together. For at least the last five years, Ministry has been all about telling us this. And I hope, in 2008 and beyond, that we finally listen.

Now, of course, I don’t believe that The Last Sucker will be the final Ministry album. This shitty world will no doubt piss off Al Jourgensen again before too long, and we’ll get another righteous blast of intense, precise, explosive rage. And thank God for that, because we need artists like Jourgensen to spit bile all over us every once in a while. But if he’s true to his word, and The Last Sucker is the finale, then it does the job well. It gets off to a slow start, but by the end, it’s a perfect way to bow out, and a strong capper to a quarter-century of venom.

So thanks, Al. Take a bow.

* * * * *

And now it’s time for the third quarter report on my top 10 list.

It’s changed significantly from the second quarter, with new entries in half the slots, and a few stalwarts dropping off entirely after some reconsideration. And you’ll notice that the top two slots have flipped – Silverchair’s still-dazzling Young Modern hasn’t held up as well as I’d have liked on repeat play, while the Shins’ Wincing the Night Away recaptured my heart recently.

I still feel like I haven’t heard the number one album of the year yet, but if I were to finalize the list right now, here’s how it would look:

#10. Suzanne Vega, Beauty and Crime.
#9. Minus the Bear, Planet of Ice.
#8. The Swirling Eddies, The Midget, the Speck and the Molecule.
#7. Over the Rhine, The Trumpet Child.
#6. Bright Eyes, Cassadaga.
#5. Okkervil River, The Stage Names.
#4. Aqualung, Memory Man.
#3. The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible.
#2. Silverchair, Young Modern.
#1. The Shins, Wincing the Night Away.

There are still a few terrific-looking weeks coming up, and I still haven’t heard a number of new albums from September yet – I just can’t seem to find the time to stay ahead. So I hope this list changes, and I hope that, like last year, a fourth-quarter surprise will leap out at me and proclaim itself my number one choice. As it is, though, this list isn’t bad at all.

Next week, probably a long one with a bunch of September records I haven’t reviewed yet. And of course, a look at The Three Doctors.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So there’s this show called Doctor Who that I’ve been watching.

I know I’ve been promising to continue my semi-regular write-ups on old Doctor Who stories for a couple of weeks now. Last time, I was nearing the end of the Patrick Troughton run, with only The Seeds of Death to go. Since then, I’ve dived headlong into Jon Pertwee’s time as the third Doctor, so I thought I’d jump ahead a little bit and talk about that. But let me first say that The Seeds of Death is fun, if a little overlong and cheap-looking. Oh, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Oh yeah, and the Ice Warriors look stupid and walk way too slowly to be menacing. And the seeds never look like anything other than balloons full of powder. But other than that, it’s fun.

Two stories later, Troughton bid farewell to the role of the Doctor with a 10-part story called The War Games. People were probably used to this idea by then – this was the Doctor’s second on-screen regeneration, so viewers knew what to expect. But I doubt anyone could have guessed just how many other things would change between seasons six and seven.

Let’s list them off. There was a new Doctor, of course, played by Jon Pertwee. This incarnation of the Doc was an often pompous, arrogant dandy with boatloads of charm – in some ways, an older James Bond type of character. A new actor playing the main character is shakeup enough, but this time, the entire supporting cast changed, too. The William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton transition was eased by keeping the same companions, but both Frazer Hines (Jamie) and Wendy Padbury (Zoe) left at the same time Troughton did.

The solution was a radical one. At the end of The War Games, the Time Lords decided to exile the Doctor to Earth, disabling his Tardis and effectively taking away the premise of the show. Soon, the Doctor became part of UNIT, the task force run by his old friend Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadeer, was the only returning actor from Troughton’s time. The Doc’s new companion was Liz Shaw, a skeptical scientist played by Caroline John.

So, new cast, new setting, new main character. What else? Oh, right – the show started filming in color.

That ends up being the biggest problem with Pertwee’s first couple of stories. The Doctor Who team was clearly not prepared to shoot in color, because they made, essentially, the same show they were making in black and white. The problem is, the cheap sets and costumes are easier to overlook in monochrome, and they become unforgivable in color. I have seen quite a bit of Doctor Who and the Silurians, Pertwee’s second story, and man… it’s chock full of what Frank Zappa would call “cheepnis.”

But that’s skipping ahead to a story that’s not even out on DVD yet. (It’s set for January in the U.K., in a box with The Sea Devils and Warriors of the Deep.) Pertwee’s debut is a tale called Spearhead from Space, and it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that the future of the show hinged on it. Viewers had to buy the new Doctor, the new cast, the Earth-centric setting, and the bright burst of color, all at once. Spearhead from Space had to be awesome.

It’s terrible.

Really, it’s truly awful. It’s no fault of the cast – Pertwee is good right away, especially in a bit in the first episode where he makes a frantic getaway in a wheelchair. Courtney and John are quite good too, with Courtney especially digging in to a role he would play, off and on, for the next 19 years. But the story is wretched. It’s about this intelligent plastic from outer space that makes department store mannequins come to life. Seriously. That’s what it’s about.

Like The Invasion, Spearhead focuses on the people working to discover and stop the alien threat. Unlike The Invasion, it is dreary and dull and endless, even at four episodes. The Autons (because that’s what the department store mannequins are called once they start moving around) are just silly-looking, not creepy. The actors playing the bad guys are one-dimensional and hammy. And there’s a bit near the end with a tentacle coming out of a tank and squeezing Pertwee’s neck, which caused a burst of uncontrollable laughter the first time I saw it.

So yeah, color was an ill fit for Doctor Who at first, and they launched their new era with a remarkably weak script, and the show was still a massive hit. So I don’t know. The Autons made their return in the first episode of the new series, Rose, and they looked stupid there, too. But many British fans can remember where they were and how old they were when they first saw the mannequins coming to life in the department store window in Spearhead, so maybe I’m missing something iconic.

All I know is this: my Pertwee collection picks up considerably with the fan-bloody-tastic Inferno, the fourth story of his run. But I’ll get to that next week. I’m also far enough along in my viewing that I can tell you that Pertwee deserves his place as one of the most adored Doctors, and Spearhead is just a case of a new team finding its footing. It gets much, much better from there.

* * * * *

A lot of my friends think I’m pretty plugged in to the music scene. Most of the time, though, I feel like I’m racing to catch trains that have already left the station.

The three albums I have on tap this week are perfect examples. I describe them as under the radar, and I wouldn’t expect most people I know to have heard of them, but I feel stupid and embarrassed to admit that I’m just now joining all three of these parties. All three bands have been around for years, and all have multiple critically-adored albums. And yet, here I am, just catching up.

This happens all the time. I missed Sufjan Stevens’ first four albums. I didn’t find Elliott Smith until XO. The first Bright Eyes album I heard was Lifted. For every band I catch hold of early, it seems like there’s three that slip through my grasp. I’m hoping that one day, I’ll wake up suddenly with a brilliant idea for a new invention, market it, make millions and spend the rest of my life hearing every new CD that comes out.

It doesn’t help that the bands I miss out on eventually turn out to be favorites. Take Pinback, for example. The first album of theirs I picked up was Summer in Abaddon, last year – two years after it came out. But you better believe I was there on the day their new one, Autumn of the Seraphs, was released.

I’d heard the name Pinback, but it sounded to me like a generic rock band name, and I stupidly didn’t investigate further. I was dead wrong – Pinback plays some of the most thoughtful guitar-based music I’ve heard, all clean tones and driving rhythms with some sparkling melodies. It’s a very difficult sound to describe – it contains elements of the Cure, Rush, Bob Mould, and a hundred other singular artists. It’s difficult, almost math-rock in its complexity, and yet you’re never left with your head spinning, because they somehow make this concoction surprisingly catchy.

Autumn of the Seraphs brings their season cycle to a halfway point with 11 of the best songs Rob Crow and Zack Smith have yet written. It is their most polished recording, with looped drums cropping up on half the tracks, and criss-crossing, silky guitars tickling your ear just about every second. “From Nothing to Nowhere” kicks things off with a backbeat, while “Good to Sea” will burrow into your brain. But it’s the gentler songs, like “How We Breathe,” that really set this album apart. It’s been a constant evolution to this point, where the pianos are as prominent as the six-strings, but songs like the almost Beatlesque “Devil You Know” ably show why the journey here was worth it.

One quibble – the opening riff of “Blue Harvest” was clearly ripped off from “Message in a Bottle” by the Police, although the song goes some fascinating, almost Yes-like places from there. But that’s it. The whole album is kind of amazing, and will easily factor in my top 10 list decisions this year. I know I prefaced this review by shining a light on my own ignorance, but I still feel confident in saying that there really isn’t another band out there quite like Pinback.

Well, there is Minus the Bear, although the similarities are surface-level. Both bands play complex, clean-toned, driving nerd-rock, and both have been on a road towards more atmospheric works. But where Pinback goes for otherworldly beauty, Minus the Bear just flat-out rocks.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Minus is a band that’s only recently grown up. In truth, all of their albums are serious-minded and complex, but the early ones were saddled with non-sequitur titles like They Make Beer Commercials Like This and This is What I Know About Being Gigantic. Their new one has a much more straightforward title: Planet of Ice. The song titles have all been taken seriously this time too, with the possible exception of the witty “Double Vision Quest.” It’s almost as if the band has decided to finally make the packaging suit the sound.

And what a sound it is. Minus the Bear is clearly a band that works out every second of its music, determining which notes from which instruments will fall on each beat of each song. Their music is intricate and moody, disparate strands of sound spinning out into a perfectly formed latticework. They’re not as catchy as Pinback, but a song like “Knights” works overtime to pull your ears 12 different ways, and the result is enthralling.

The album’s centerpiece is the six-minute “Dr. L’Ling” and its sequel, “Part 2.” Together, they form a 10-minute mission statement, exploding with rhythmic force one minute and drenching itself in fog the next. That they follow it up with the 2:46 “Throwin’ Shapes,” the closest this album comes to a potential hit song, is almost gilding the lily – Minus the Bear is a band that has carefully carved out its own niche, and they’re now exploring it with all they’ve got. The album concludes with the nearly nine-minute “Lotus,” a prog-rock epic that almost serves as a crash course. Planet of Ice is the best record Minus the Bear has made, and another step on a fascinating and unique trip.

But as much as I love both those records – and if it’s not clear, Planet of Ice is another contender for my year-end list – they’re both just refinements, not massive upheavals. For that, you need to turn to multi-national trio Liars.

I have to give Pitchfork credit for this one. They named Drum’s Not Dead, Liars’ third album, as their 6th favorite record of last year, and wrote about it in such descriptive, dazzling language that I simply had to check it out. Of course, now I’m embarrassed that I wasn’t on this train to begin with, but what can you do. Drum’s Not Dead proved impenetrable for a long time, but I stuck with it, and now I consider it one of the most intriguing albums I’ve heard all year.

And then I bought the back catalog, and I was blown away by how far the sound has come in just three albums. The first record, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, is angular, guitar-fueled, stabbing rock – short bursts of near-punk songs with a Fugazi meets Franz Ferdinand feel to them. But the second, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, sets off in a much more droning, atonal direction, taking cues from Japanese noise artists and hypnotic ambient music.

That evolution reached its peak on Drum’s Not Dead, a concept album about doubt and creativity. It’s a strange, off-kilter masterpiece, full of tribal drums, single-note drones, and some of the most unsettling falsetto vocals you’ll hear anywhere. It’s a shambling noise sculpture, miles away from the simplistic rock of their debut, and though there isn’t a single catchy song on it anywhere, it’s an immersive listen from beginning to end.

I read the advance press on their fourth record, Liars, with some dismay – they seemed to be heading back to three-minute rock songs, with verses and choruses and everything. I do realize how odd it is for me to be dismayed at the prospect of structured pop songs, but there you are. Not to worry, though – the self-titled album isn’t quite the return to rock we were led to expect, and thank God for that.

What this album does do is refocus the band, to great effect. Liars is just as noisy and off-balance as Drum’s Not Dead, but it’s performed largely on guitars, with a definite emphasis on sharper songwriting. A song like “Houseclouds,” with an electronic beat propping up a decent hook, is this band’s version of pop, and “Cycle Time” sounds a bit like an attempt to do Led Zeppelin, but then there are tracks like “Leather Prowler” that shamble forward, out of phase and covered in static, and drones like “The Dumb in the Rain” that set your nerves on edge.

This is the sound of Liars taking stock, of trying to graft the strange trips of the last few records onto the rock band they used to be. Strangely enough, it works – this is a weird record, but in comparison to the last two they’ve made, it’s almost catchy, and it cements Liars as a band to watch. Some may listen to this and feel like the band is trying to put one over on everyone – why would they choose to sound like this? But delve in, and you’ll see that this is absolutely purposeful work, taking from a wide range of influences and melding them all together into something new. It’s so new that what you’re hearing is its infancy, its first few steps, its first attempts at words. And I’m excited to watch it grow up.

Next week, probably the final Ministry album, but maybe also new ones from Foo Fighters, Nellie McKay, the Weakerthans, Eddie Vedder and Mark Knopfler.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I know I promised a look at some under-the-radar records this time, including the fantastic new Pinback album, but the new Fish CD showed up in my mailbox on Monday, and I haven’t been listening to anything else since. So I’m gonna talk about that. Next week, I’m sure I’ll get to the new ones from Pinback, Liars and Minus the Bear, but let me just say up front that my choice not to review them this week is in no way a vote against the albums themselves. They’re all great, and all worth your cash.

But for this week, it’s the charismatic Scotsman and his 13th Star.

* * * * *

A couple of weeks ago, Fish played a one-off reunion gig with Marillion.

Fish was their original singer, and thanks to a couple of hits (“Kayleigh,” “Lavender”) on the other side of the pond, he’s still strongly associated with them. Poor Steve Hogarth has been fronting Marillion since 1989, but Fish’s persona and presence are so strongly imprinted on the band that Hogarth is still considered “the new guy” by many. In fact, just about every week on the band’s online forum, someone asks whether a reunion is possible. I find the question insulting to the 18 years of amazing work Hogarth has contributed to the band, but still, people ask.

And a couple of weeks ago, those people got their wish. The four instrumentalists in Marillion joined Fish in the Market Square in Aylesbury to perform (what else?) “Market Square Heroes,” the band’s first single from 1983. By all accounts, a good time was had by all, and I wish I’d been there.

Of course, those same fans that have been begging for a reunion are trying to make more of this one-off than it is, and that makes me sad. This sort of spontaneous reunion could only have happened now, when both Marillion and Fish are producing their best work separately – it’s the only way both parties could be secure enough to even try it. Marillion’s in a great place right now, and even though their 14th album, Somewhere Else, doesn’t quite do it for me, their 13th, Marbles, was perhaps the best thing they’ve ever done.

And while Fish’s solo career has seen its ups and downs, lately he’s been on a roll. The erstwhile Derek Dick released a scorcher of an eighth album a few years ago called Field of Crows, and a stunning acoustic collection called Communion earlier this year. His voice has dropped considerably, and is now this low, rumbling instrument that he’s learned to wield to his advantage – his later work is darker, heavier and creepier than the more Marillion-esque material he used to write.

That trend continues on 13th Star, his terrific new album, but it’s so much more than that. This record is a culmination point for Fish, a summation of all the places he’s been and a beacon pointing towards some distant, undiscovered shore. Is it his best solo album? Well, I’ve only listened to it half a dozen times, but at this early stage in my relationship with 13th Star, I’m ready to say yes.

But let’s back up a bit. When I first heard the title of this album, I was a little puzzled, especially since Fish himself made mention of this being his 13th album. As far as I could tell, there were only nine, counting 13th Star – was I missing a few? I tried adding in collections, like Yin and Yang and Bouillabaisse, but still couldn’t get to 13. And if you mix in all of his various live albums, you get more than 30. I didn’t get it.

And then it hit me. He’s counting the four albums he did with Marillion.

As well he should, since they’re as much Fish’s as anyone else’s, but by encapsulating those four seminal releases, the Piscine One has drawn a straight line from the man he was to the man he is on 13th Star. And while that’s quite a trip, it’s amazing how little some things have changed – Fish is still a helpless romantic, still washed up on the shores of his own failed relationships, and still searching for something better and more meaningful. The Fish of Misplaced Childhood is, in many ways, the same guy that narrates 13th Star.

But one thing has changed, and it’s done so gradually, so you probably wouldn’t notice it so much without playing an early Marillion album and 13th Star back to back: Fish has become a much more direct lyricist in the intervening years. The early Marillion albums are all about Fish, but he disguised his emotions and insecurities in stories about jesters and visions and lizards. These days, he writes about himself in naked, simple language, and never more so than on this album.

In other words, it’s a long way from “The fool escaped from paradise will look over his shoulder and cry, sit and chew on daffodils and struggle to answer why” to “I was lying to even think I could survive without your love, I can’t deny it,” but the sentiments are the same.

13th Star was written during the final weeks of Fish’s public romance with Heather Findlay, singer of Mostly Autumn, and what we get here is a concept album about the dissolution of their relationship. The basic story is of a restless sailor in search of truth, who finds a navigator, is betrayed, and continues searching on. But on prior records, Fish might have disguised the origins of his tale, and here he lays it all out there – he’s hurting, he’s bitter, he thought this one would last, he’s sorry. Even with all the visual imagery artist Mark Wilkinson painted into the amazing (and I mean amazing) cover art, this is Fish’s most personal and pure record ever.

“Circle Line” and “Square Go” set the scene, and they may as well be two halves of a whole. Both are based on repetitive grooves, meant to symbolize the circles our protagonist sails in without his navigator, and both have a surprising depth of color and arrangement, given their single-minded beats and bass lines. Fish wrote most of this album with bassist Steve Vantsis, so the rhythm sections here get a lot of attention, and Fish’s voice is almost a bass instrument itself here.

There is no set Fish style, mostly because the man can’t play any instruments, and so he’s at the mercy of his collaborators each time out. That’s why Marillion’s been more consistent over the years, but Fish has been more adventurous – “Square Go” is one of the heaviest things Fish has ever done, almost industrial in tone, and it works wonderfully. But then it segues into “Milos de Besos” (Spanish for “millions of kisses”), a sweet piano ballad in the vein of “Tara” from Sunsets on Empire.

“Zoe 25” is about meeting your navigator, and not realizing it. It’s also the catchiest pop song here, nearly sprightly in comparison with some of the other tracks. It contains the key line of the album, as far as I’m concerned: “You know you’ll never find her when you’re still looking for yourself.” This endless journey of self-discovery and the relationships it leaves in its wake is the keystone of Fish’s work, and I’ve never seen him lay it out there so directly.

The rest of the album is about Findlay, and there’s no hiding it. “Arc of the Curve” is an acoustic-driven love song, looking at the hopeful start of the relationship, ending with the line “I could never contemplate that you would ever walk away.” But she did, and the second half of 13th Star is about picking up the pieces. Here’s “Manchmal,” another industrial-strength rocker, about the pain of betrayal. Here’s “Openwater,” about the navigator leaving our hero adrift on the open sea. And here’s “Dark Star,” a bitter tune that rehashes the worst moments of the breakup.

Is all this too much straight diary entry? Should Fish have disguised his topic behind more inscrutable metaphors? Perhaps, but I get the sense that he couldn’t have written this album any other way. Fish has never examined and immortalized a relationship the way he’s done this one, and it sometimes feels like voyeurism just listening. (I do wonder how Findlay feels about this record…)

The final two tracks are the most searing and personal, probably because they’re the slowest and most exposed songs here, musically speaking. “Where in the World” deftly sidesteps mawkishness, not an easy task when Fish has written lines like “You took me by surprise, you hurt me so deep inside.” In that song, he wonders where he will go from here, and in the title track, he answers himself – he’ll follow his destiny, navigate by the stars. This part of the journey is finished, but the rest could take a lifetime, and he knows it.

I’ve barely talked about the music, and that’s because, fine as it is, it takes a back seat to the words and the emotions this time. Let me say this, though: 13th Star sounds better than any other Fish album. The production is excellent, the arrangements superb. As for the songs themselves, while I like them all, I think the writing is a notch down from Field of Crows. But here’s the thing – 13th Star sets up such a consistent mood that it plays like one long song, inseparable in the same way Clutching at Straws is. It is a better album of slightly lesser songs, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Fish is nearly 50, and while you can hear his age in his voice here and there, this album is strikingly adventurous for a guy with a 25-year recording career behind him. He’s still trying new things, pulling in new sounds, and making the best records of his life. If you can handle the bare emotionalism of songs like “Where in the World,” you’ll find that 13th Star is quite possibly the best thing Fish has done since leaving Marillion. It’s a 55-minute voyage through sometimes choppy seas, with an uncertain destination, but when it’s over, you’ll want to take the trip again. It’s a fine reward for the big man’s persistence and vision, and also for those of us who’ve followed that vision for years.

Check Fish out here.

Next week, the three I promised last week, and more Doctor Who musings.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I don’t want to hate anything.

I get the sense sometimes that this is what separates me from some other online music critics. I want to love everything I hear. The practical reason for this is obvious – every CD I buy costs me money, and I don’t want to feel like I’ve thrown away 10 bucks. But it goes deeper than that. Every time I plunk down my cash and take a chance on a new album, I’m not-so-secretly hoping that this is the one that changes my life again.

That’s one reason I buy so many records – the more dross I sift through, the better my chances of landing on some gold. That’s the theory, anyway, but it hasn’t quite panned out in practice. My life gets re-ordered by some band or another on a regular basis, but it’s usually once every couple of years. The last two years have seen the arrival of Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom into my musical pantheon, which is better than the usual every-24-months-or-so average. But I’ve been buying CDs at a ridiculous rate for years now.

Most music just bores me, honestly. It just slides in and out of my life without making much of an impact. I can’t say, for example, that I care enough about a band like Maroon 5 to hate them. I don’t hate them, I just don’t listen to them, because their music is like cold grey oatmeal to me. No, in order to get me to hate something, you have to first get me to care about it. With a band, that usually happens over time, and there’s no crueler twist of the knife for a music fan like me than finding something I dislike from a band I’ve loved for years.

If there’s anything I hate, it’s that. It’s a mixture of disappointment and betrayal – I’ve expended all this time and money following this journey, and you give me… this. What is this? Why did you think this was good enough?

The new Crowded House, Time on Earth, is a great example. I will follow Neil Finn’s music until one of us dies, but he’s been slipping lately, and Time on Earth is probably his lowest point, the shabbiest collection of songs he’s ever penned. I’m hoping time will work its magic on that record, but I doubt it, and as I said before, if this had been merely Finn’s disappointing new solo album, that would have been one thing. But it’s not. It’s the new Crowded House album, and it’s like Finn has no idea what that means to his fans.

But the prize for 2007’s Biggest Disappointment still belongs to Marillion. Three years ago, I wouldn’t shut up about this band. I’d loved them for ages, but rarely as intensely as I did in 2004, when the long-running Aylesbury quintet released their modern masterpiece, Marbles. This album was (and is) simply brilliant, a revival and a restatement all at once – here was everything that makes Marillion great, only on Marbles, it was all better than it had been in 10 years.

I still think they’re one of the best bands in the world. They are often mis-labeled as prog rock, when in fact what they do is emotional head music – thoughtful and difficult music that still bypasses the cerebral cortex and aims straight for the heart. They’re able to pull this off in about a dozen different styles, and they write two-minute pop gems and 20-minute epics with equal aplomb. They’re led by Steve Hogarth, one of the finest singers you’re likely to hear – nearly every song he sings gives me goosebumps. And in Steve Rothery they have an extraordinary guitar player, wringing surprising feeling out of every note.

I gush, but trust me, this isn’t a love letter. Their 14th album, Somewhere Else, landed with a thud on my doorstep back in April, and I had to listen to it three times before I could believe it. This was Marillion’s new album, and I… didn’t… like it. At all.

And so I put it aside, expecting, as I will do with Time on Earth, to come back to it later with fresh ears. Instead, though, it’s sat there on my shelf, gathering dust. So I think it’s time for a reappraisal now, and I’ll tell you why – I’ve just received the latest issue of the band’s Front Row Club concert subscription service, and it’s fantastic.

The Front Row Club was a great idea while it lasted – fans pay 100 bucks a year, and they’re rewarded with six full concerts on CD, sent right to their doors. The band is switching to a download-only version of the club after the next two issues, but before they do, they will have issued 40 of these CD sets, representing every era of Marillion history, from their earliest shows in 1983 to the current tour.

The latest, number 38, was taken from the Somewhere Else tour, and for the first time on any live release, it incorporates songs from that album. And amazingly, they hold up. Okay, “See It Like a Baby” is still crap, and it’s nearly painful to listen to them trundle their way through it, especially since it’s the second song of this set. And they didn’t play my other least-favorites, “Most Toys” and “Thankyou Whoever You Are.”

But man, listening to this recording, all my issues with the rest of these songs just fade away. “Somewhere Else” sounds like a classic here – it’s the Marillion sound, keyboard shimmers and aching guitar and Hogarth’s dazzling falsetto, and it stands up next to songs like “Afraid of Sunlight” nicely. “Voice From the Past” sounds even better here, segueing in from a piano-vocal take on “Cover My Eyes,” and what was somewhat static on record is, on stage, a mesmerizing, ever-flowering crescendo.

“The Wound” absolutely comes alive in this setting, and while I still cringe at some of the lyrics to “The Last Century for Man,” the music’s foreboding, moody blues vibe is very effective. Even without the studio-created orchestral ending.

So, in short, the Somewhere Else material impressed me here. Of course, that meant I had to drag out Somewhere Else for another go, which I did this afternoon.

And you know what?

It isn’t that bad.

It’s no Marbles, it’s no masterpiece, but over time, as the songs have burrowed their way into my brain, my reaction has mellowed. It’s weak, no doubt – “Most Toys” remains the worst song they’ve done in years, with “See It Like a Baby” close behind, and once you hit track five, there really aren’t any choruses to speak of. But as a mood piece, the second half works. “Voice From the Past” is elegant, starting small and ending up massive. “No Such Thing” is a wonder, still – a single repeated guitar figure, a mantra-like vocal, and some grand atmospherics. And “Last Century” has really started to stand up and claim its place as a good song, Hogarth’s “hats off to China” notwithstanding.

And “Faith,” my forgotten favorite, rounds it out nicely. I forgot how much I like the French horn finale, and Hogarth’s voice sends chills.

I’m not putting this near the top of my Marillion list anytime soon, but time has done its trick. Somewhere Else is a middling record, and a disappointing one after the wonder that was Marbles, but I no longer wonder what they were thinking. It’s there in the grooves of the record, and all it took was a fresh listen to find it.

But if I can, I want to put in a plug for Front Row Club Issue 38. Sadly, you can’t buy this two-CD set without throwing down for a full year’s worth of the club, but it is a perfect two-hour summation of this band. It starts with “Splintering Heart,” a 16-year-old song that’s still the best concert opener they’ve penned. It includes “Afraid of Sunlight,” and “Fantastic Place,” and “You’re Gone,” and “Three Minute Boy.” The band plays the complete 17-minute “Ocean Cloud,” perhaps their best long song. They cap it off with “Neverland,” the best concert closer they’ve penned, and encore with the perennially heart-wrenching “Easter.” (This song moves me every time, no matter how many times I hear it.)

For the past few months, I’ve been in need of a reminder of why I consider Marillion one of the best bands on the planet. Front Row Club Issue 38 is exactly the thing I needed. You want to know why I praise this band as much as I do? Listen to this, from start to finish. You’ll understand.

* * * * *

Today’s Doctor Who flies by at a brisk clip.

Most of the stories are done in one episode nowadays, beginning and ending inside of 45 minutes. There are regular two-part stories, which come in at about 90 minutes, but you’ll only get two or three of those a season. And the finale of the third season (or series, as they call it across the pond) was a linked three-parter, still less than the equivalent of a six-episode story in the classic series.

It’s not just the length, it’s the pace. The new series rushes along at the speed of… well, everything else on TV. It’s frenetic and quick-cutting, and while I like that style, I find myself more attracted to the slower, more luxurious pace of the 1960s and 1970s Who. The old series takes its time, lingering on moments and extending conversations, and what would be crammed into one episode these days often took four, or six, back then.

All this is a way of saying that The Invasion, Patrick Troughton’s 17th story as the Doctor, is long and slow. It’s long even by Who standards – it spans eight episodes, and runs more than three hours. And it’s slow by Who standards, too. This is a classic alien invasion story, with the Doctor discovering and foiling a plan by his recurring enemies, the Cybermen. (Them again?) But viewers don’t even get a glimpse of a Cyberman until the end of episode four, more than an hour and a half in. And the invasion doesn’t even start in earnest until the closing moments of episode six.

So what is this, then? The Invasion is a story about people, and it’s all the better for it. Here’s the rundown: the Cybermen have enlisted the help of Tobias Vaughn, the head of International Electromatics, a worldwide electronics company. Vaughn, a bit of a noble nutter, wants to save humanity from itself, and he wants to use the Cybermen to do it. So he helps them out – he puts mind-control devices into his company’s products, and lets the Cybermen use his facilities as bases for their invasion.

This comes to light very slowly, as the Doctor and his companions, Jamie and Zoe, start off looking for a missing professor, and begin piecing together Vaughn’s plot over the first four episodes. It would be wrong to call this stuff exciting, but it is engaging, and it sets a nice atmosphere as it becomes more and more clear that something sinister is going on. I do wish that I, like the viewing public in 1968, hadn’t known about the role the Cybermen play in this story, because the reveal at the end of episode four is effective and surprising.

But even after that, the pace doesn’t pick up. The Invasion is an important story in Doctor Who lore because it introduces UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, led by Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. UNIT and the Brigadier became staples of the show during the next few years, and in total, Nicholas Courtney played Lethbridge-Stewart in more than 100 episodes. So we spend some time in The Invasion getting to know him and his men, and we undertake a pair of daring rescues with them.

We also spend an awful lot of time with Tobias Vaughn and his team, although we really don’t get into what makes Vaughan tick until the end. There’s a very large cast in The Invasion, and each of them gets a number of good moments – by the end, we’ve gotten to know them all a little bit, and that’s down to the length and pace of the story. Don’t get me wrong, The Invasion isn’t a deep character drama – there’s a lot of pointless running around, a few shootouts and a full-scale military-vs.-metal-men finale, after all – but it is darker, slower and more serious than you might expect from this show.

I mentioned last time that there are only six complete Troughton stories in the BBC vaults, but The Invasion isn’t one of them – episodes one and four are missing. But for this DVD, the producers have come up with an ingenious solution. The audio soundtracks still exist, thanks to fans recording them off air in 1968, and the BBC enlisted animation studio Cosgrove Hall to reconstruct the missing episodes to the audio tracks. The result is brilliant. It’s in black and white, and meshes perfectly with the live-action episodes. It’s awesome, and I hope the BBC uses Cosgrove Hall again – it would be a great way to preserve the more than 100 missing episodes.

Of course, you’ve got a team of animators itching to take a crack at the Cybermen, and except for a two-second glimpse at the end of the fourth episode, there just aren’t any Cybermen in the missing installments. Ah well… Most of The Daleks’ Master Plan is missing, and I’m sure they’d have fun with that one, too.

The Invasion again makes my point that the Doctor Who format is limitless. This story directly follows The Mind Robber, shifting the tone completely from drug-trip fantasy to suspenseful, earthbound drama. While I do think that The Invasion is a tad too long, it benefits immensely from its luxurious pace, and even though it’s a story about metal men in spaceships, it stands as one of the most down-to-earth Who serials available on DVD right now. Two stories later, the producers will flip that tone on its ear with The Seeds of Death, but we’ll get to that one next week.

And after that, Jon Pertwee arrives, and the entire format of the show changes completely. There’s a reason Doctor Who has been around for more than 40 years – the concept is one of the most flexible ever created for television. Show someone episodes from 1966, 1976, 1986 and 2006, and they’d never peg them as examples of the same show, but they are. And the well still hasn’t run dry.

* * * * *

This column is already way too long, but I wanted to put in one recommendation before I go.

Morphine was a band unlike any other. They were the two-string bass and baritone vocals of Mark Sandman, the bari sax of Dana Colley, and the down-tuned drums of Billy Conway, and that was all. They played smoky, sexy, low-register blues-rock, and they could turn any size venue into a dingy nightclub just with their sound.

Mark Sandman died in 1999, but the other two members of Morphine have continued on with a band called the Twinemen, named after a comic strip Sandman used to write. The duo joined forces with singer-songwriter Laurie Sargent, whose vocals are suitably smoke-filled, and they thankfully continue to sound much like Morphine did.

Their third album, the unfortunately-titled Twinetime, is their best yet. It’s eight longer songs, exploring their moodier side, and there’s not a bum note here. The songs are simple, but smooth and haunting – you won’t be able to get the opener, “The End of My Dreams,” out of your head, trust me. It’s fascinating to hear such a low, rumbling sound topped off with the sweet, higher-register vocals of Sargent – Morphine was all about the bass, but the Twinemen add other colors.

The Twinemen aren’t about to set the world ablaze, but it’s wonderful to hear these musicians continuing to play together, and develop a sound immortalized by the late Sandman. If you dug Morphine, you’ll like this.

Next week, we go under the radar with Pinback, Liars and Minus the Bear.

See you in line Tuesday morning.