Costa Del Slough

Lyrics

The opening track from Radiation, it's not so much a song as a warning to fans to say "This is not your usual Marillion album". I mean, sure, they all have their own individual sound, but it's usually a pretty subtle distinction, which is really not the case here. Radiation came out in 1998, a year after OK Computer, which certainly a fairly large impact on it, and the usual glossy sheen of the production is replaced by something a lot more muddy and raw. That second point is something a lot of fans have trouble getting past, and it's frequently rated as one of their worst, which is fair enough, but it is one of my favourites. Clutching At Straws and Brave are kind of in a league of their own, and it's not quite on the level of Afraid Of Sunlight, but it's definitely up there. It's like what I was saying in the last entry; this album is one of the successful experiments as far as I'm concerned, and an end result like this is why I'll forgive a few "Hope For The Future"s along the way.

Anyway, somewhere amidst the noise and the feedback and distortion at the album's beginning, there is a merry little ditty about global warming, which is obviously a joke, and not a particularly good one, but since it's nicely hidden behind all the aforementioned stuff, it's not really a bother, and it does lead in very nicely to the first real song, which is quite a belter.