I'm not going to lie, when it comes to Marillion, my heart dramatically swings towards the Fish years when the band produced some of the best neo-progressive rock there ever was. Since then, I've had quite a complicated relationship with the band and his music, one made of sweet crushes and dire disappointments.

In recent years, say since the beginning of the new millennium, though I appreciated that aerial progressive pop approach which became Marillion's trademark sound starting with Afraid of Sunlight (1995), I failed to find an album really worthy of the band's past grandeur. It's always a job well done by skilled and obviously experienced musicians but it's kind of…bland.

And here comes album 16 (not counting the acoustic re-recordings thingy, Less Is More, which was exceptionally poor anyway), and it is called Sounds That Can't Be Made… Really? Have Marillion found the fountain of youth and finally, amazingly redefined their music? Well, to be honest, Sounds That Can't Be Changed would have been a more fitting title to the album but, hey, you can't teach and old dog new tricks, they say.

Anyway, what really matters is not innovation; it's not something one has come to expect when picking a Marillion album off the rack. What matters is the quality of the music, the effect of the journey in which this particular kind of music is supposed to take us through and, well, it hurts me to say, because I really wanted to like the whole of this album (just like I really wanted to like every song of every album Marillion has ever released), if it has great (great!) moments, it sometimes is pretty boring too. Actually, it can even pretty and boring at the same time. Pretty because those lads have the chops and know how to use it and therefore produce sounds (that they can make) which are harmonious enough never to displease the ear, and boring because it sometimes feels like yet another obligatory release Marillion had to put out in order to continue to exist in the public eye (even if for just a fugitive moment), and content their fans which are some of the most loyal and devoted you'll ever find (and to whom Montréal, H's journal of a Marillion's fan convention turned into a song, is an heartfelt tribute).

Sonically, the album's pretty close to what Marillion displayed on Marbles aka multi-layered modern synthesizers' sounds, ethereal guitar parts, Hogarth's oh so typical plaintive vocals and a rhythm section that does the job nicely if often a tad too "laidbacky" for my taste. This transcribes into a 8 tracks and almost 75 minutes selection where the very fine opening epic (Gaza, where Marillion fugitively sounds heavier than it ever did), which is not without flaws but flows nicely relying on the climates, variations it builds and its true melodic strength, clearly is the highlight and a piece where the 5 progsters have, in my opinion, put the more effort into. Not to be overenthusiastic about it but I daresay it's the best thing Marillion's came up with since the beginning of the millennium.
Other choice tracks include the title track and its unusual, for the band, almost robotic melody/rhythm pattern for what turns out to be quite a dreamy/trippy affair, the aforementioned Montréal (to the fans!) and the other album highlight, the epic moody and stellar closer, The Sky Above the Rain, but not the "single" (or what sounds like it was intended to be it), Pour My Love which turns out to be yet another overblown sappy ballad which would have fitted more on a Simply Red album than one of Marillion (save for Rothery's fine little guitar chorus).

The rest, as you might have understood already, constitutes the boring part of Sounds That Can't Be Made. Actually, none of the three songs are bad per se, and I definitely can see why über-fans of the band would enjoy them as all the components they've come to know and love were conscientiously gathered but, sorry, none of those managed to move me. Ok, the final crescendo of Power (before it goes down again) works nicely but comes too late to save the song for me, Invisible Ink (on which bassman Trewaras helps on the guitars) has a nice intro but fails to turn into a convincingly addictive rocker and, finally, Lucky Man, probably the weakest of it all, which made me nauseous with its display of platitudes, faux-joie de vivre which ruined what potentially sounded like a decent enough piece of classic rock.

So…It's not a bad album. Certainly a return to form when compared to Happiness is the Road or Somewhere Else, on par with Anoraknophobia and Marillion.com which is good enough if you're at least a little bit interested in Marillion and the brand of contemporary progressive rock they produce, one where aggression is seldom met, one in which harmony and good feelings are prime directives. Yours truly is, actually, quite content with it, thank you very much.