Reading your post, I don't think I should continue. If Misplaced Childhood is the best of that era, then there's no hope for me. Only liked the first two tracks. And I honestly thought Interior Lulu and House were incredibly boring when I got to that part of the album.
Eh. Different strokes for different folks. But I'll give all of these albums another shot down the road, I promise. And yes, it was the 2-disc version of Marbles I bought. After being told "if you like this band, then you'll love Marillion" so many times, I really want to like them, but it just wasn't doing it for me.
I was in your shoes when I first discovered Marillion. It was back in 2005, not long after I started my journey through the world of prog and discovered Transatlantic. When I found out their supergroup status, I sought out albums from their parent bands (other than DT, who I had already been familiar with for over a year). I found Spock's Beard to be most to my liking (and they still are), with The Flower Kings channeling the Genesis/Yes sound, but Marillion was an oddball. I got a few of their albums and the Fish-Era sounded like a cheap Gabriel-Era Genesis knock-off with cheesier 80's synths and over-dramatic vocals, then found their later stuff to be too...well, less what I liked.
After a couple years of hearing more and various prog bands, I went back to Marillion, and took a chronological journey through their discography and discovered their evolution from Genesis-inspired neo-prog to something that became like a melding of their early H-Era sound and Porcupine Tree. Being a fan of PT really helped me appreciate their sound - they're both British, have such unique vocals, and create atmospheres with their music, rather than music full of riffs and flashy virtuosity. Marillion was/is all about mood, atmosphere and emotion, rather than power and speed. Since then, albums like
Marbles and
Happiness Is The Road have become favorites of mine, and the former even ranks among my Top 10 albums of ALL time.
I think a band like Marillion takes a LOT of time to understand, and deservedly so as their evolving sound really deserves a chronological understand of where they've been, and where they're going. Each album, to me (now), has it's own sound and feel, it's own atmosphere, and you get a sense that each album really has it's own identity, which is brilliant considering only a few of their albums are conceptual (the four Fish-Era albums,
Brave,
Marbles).
-Marc.