At their current production rate, Marillion will probably have another record out before the decade closes, but just in case they get sidetracked (stockpiling canned goods, wiring bunkers for solar power, learning to dowse, etc.), Radiation, the band's tenth studio album, and sixth with their second line-up, offers a token of their end-of-the-world esteem. The cover depicts a man, standing on an eerily-lit beach, holding what appears to be either a forlorn bouquet of weeds or humanity's last sheaf of wheat, with his head on fire, and the album opens in correspondingly dire fashion with the sternly sarcastic global-warming admonition "Under the Sun". "The hole in the ozone layer is allright by me", Steve Hogarth mutters over the phone, failing to stifle a yawn, in the mock-folk intro. "Makes England warmer in the summer". It's a throwaway line, half echoing and half undermining the similarly-themed title track from Seasons End, the first Marillion/Hogarth album, and the song launches into a choppy, anthemic sprawl that plays the title phrase for its generic resonance, not its content, but there are actually three levels of points to it, which is three or four more than the usual rock-song allotment. First, there's nothing inherently catastrophic about the temperature of the planet changing. The planet itself is indifferent, and as I write, here in Cambridge, with a ferocious wind supplementing the ten-degree chill outside that means New England is almost ready for one of only two holidays a year where people walk around outside at night, it's tempting to shrug and figure that the large portions of humanity who have opted, stubbornly, to live in areas where it's often much too cold for anybody's good could use the heat. You can almost imagine, if you forget, selectively, about rising coast lines and how precariously many human settlements, particularly in the non-CD-overconsuming parts of the world, perch on the edges of the oceans, that global warming is either the Earth's, or our own, compensation for our having mislocated civilization, to begin with, and been subsequently too proud to admit it and move somewhere more humane. The second-order point, I think, is that although of course nobody seriously endorses this idea (we remember, eventually, about the burning head, and/or vaguely-remembered Bangladesh flooding death-tolls), our denial mechanisms are sometimes more powerful than we consciously admit, and glib feigned resignation is often cover for dangerous apathy. "Global warming" is an unfortunate choice of words; it sounds too benign. "The hole in the ozone layer" sounds too localized. "Radiation", one of the modern era's purest fear-inducing words, would be much better at fostering continuing alarm. And the difficult meta-point the song tosses in, almost in passing, at the end of the intro ("What's wrong with the odd melanoma, / If it gets us all out of the coma?"), is that adversity is easily the best motivator, so perhaps we need this. Perhaps, as a species, we require the pressures of ozone depletion, and viral plagues, and overpopulation, and religious terrorists with nuclear weapons and legacy accounting systems with Y2K tumors to push us to the next stage of our evolution. Perhaps only wrecking this planet will get us off it and out into the rest of the waiting universe. It didn't work for the dinosaurs, but maybe they just didn't phase out the COBOL modules fast enough.

Surprisingly, after this apocalyptic opening, and given how long it's been since Marillion's last concept album (1994's Brave), the rest of Radiation turns out to be much smaller and more personal. "The Answering Machine" follows the sad collapse of a long-distance relationship that maybe only ever had potential in one direction, and the narrator's concluding plea, "Let me talk to the answering machine", is a reminder, more chilling if you meditate on it while sitting in front of a computer, alone, at two in the morning, that building relationships with machines is frequently an avoidance mechanism for building them with people. "Three Minute Boy" translates the perils-of-fame theme from Afraid of Sunlight's "Gazpacho" into the domain of pop, investing a familiar trajectory with some pathos and grace (I love that the pop star's glamorous girlfriend goes back to her parents when the money runs out), and even hints at the phenomenon's cannibalistic feeding-cycle ("When he was young, / Staring at the TV, / He watched the fun / Happenin' to other people"; when we define "fun" this way, no wonder it chews up the people who get to "have" it). The haunting "Now She'll Never Know" is a collection of regrets, for both of them, at the end of a relationship, and "These Chains" is a hopeful companion piece about the freedoms you never think to request until they're imposed on you. "Born to Run", deliberately recasting a hackneyed title, watches the grand battle we fight against our own natures, for show, never hoping or intending to win. The oblique "Cathedral Wall" visits one of the great romantic dilemmas, that unattainability is essential to sustaining a quest, and yet also the reason the quest can never end successfully (a Grail in hand is not the embodiment of triumph, it's an insurance headache waiting to happen). And the monumental "A Few Words for the Dead", the finale, twirls an entire cultural tradition of effort and assertion in its hands and wonders, with more than a little Zen insight, if love isn't an alternative to it, instead of another forum in which it can be expressed.

Musically, I've more or less granted Marillion emeritus status in my life, which confers upon them the right to make albums that are any combination of redundant, ill-advised, over-blown, unfocused or unwieldy, without losing their place in my five-favorite-artist list, but maybe they don't realize, because Radiation sounds as thrilling and vital, to me, as anything they've done. The soaring "Under the Sun" seethes with muted guitar squawks, theremin-ish synth runs, syncopated snare cracks and a gritty Steve Rothery solo in the middle with no trace of his usual ethereal reserve. The blocky, surging "The Answering Machine" layers odd, wheezy sequencer digressions over a furious guitar substrate, like a Rush version of Yes' Union album that makes a six-piece band out of the trio circa A Farewell to Kings and their later selves circa Counterparts. "Three Minute Boy" climbs from serene, sentimental piano to dizzying guitar catharsis, including a twelve-second bridge in the middle somewhere that may be the most direct and exciting passage I've heard this year. "Now She'll Never Know" is heartbreakingly hushed, Hogarth's breathy falsetto halfway between Thom Yorke's plaintive exhaustion and Mark Hollis' ghostly frailty. "These Chains" rises from calm, unhurried piano and acoustic guitar to choruses buoyed on oscillating synth-strings and Rothery's sinuous background flutters. "Born to Run" is a deadpan late-night slow-waltz, this album's reminder, like "Cannibal Surf Babe" on Afraid of Sunlight, that Marillion's customary complications are entirely voluntary. The drifting, evasive verses of "Cathedral Wall" are draped over expansive, pealing choruses and abstruse synth hooks, and the final three minutes, after a virtual dead-stop, are like an epic fade-out in reverse, crescendoing patiently into a dense, cacophonic swirl worthy of Puressence. "A Few Words for the Dead", despite its eleven-minute bulk, is one of the band's most limber experiments, an obvious result of paying attention to the ambient remixes they've commissioned, something like an early Future Sound of London meditation gradually morphing into a Celtic folk dirge, then a fond mid-tempo rock ballad, and then a combination of the three, like Massive Attack without the dance or street impulses. The two This Strange Engine alternate versions appended to the US version, a semi-acoustic reworking of "Estonia" and a busy "Big Beat" remix of "Memory of Water", invariably sound incongruous to me, and I've taken to programming them out, but if they'd shown up on b-sides (the "Memory of Water" remix is a b-side on the UK single for "These Chains") I'd have said that this version of "Estonia" demonstrates Hogarth's gift for quiet grandeur even better than the broader album version (and certainly better than the blurry Positive Light remix that was a US bonus on This Strange Engine itself), and that the reinterpretation of "Memory of Water" as a pulsing, drum-and-bass-driven trance theme works about as well as any project with such a perverse premise could hope to. Nothing here follows up on the direction-altering potential of "Cannibal Surf Babe" (which for a brief and surreal moment threatened to be Marillion's commercial-pop crossover, but luckily nobody heard it), or proposes another, but partially for that reason Radiation seems more coherent to me than Afraid of Sunlight and This Strange Engine, as if the shadow of Brave was so long that they're only now finally out of it. Marillion and Rush share musical dilemmas, at least until unapologetic intricacy comes back (sic) into favor, but while Marillion have adopted some of the same responses, particularly the ones that involve more aggressive guitar processing, they've really only adapted their playing style, and left their compositional style alone, which makes me think, again, that Rush overreacted. There aren't any real singles here, I think, but where Afraid of Sunlight concentrated all its pop energy in "Cannibal Surf Babe" and so left the rest of the album almost becalmed, and This Strange Engine went in so many direction that I rarely managed to think of it as an album at all, Radiation counterpoises the new impulse to play loud against the band's recent penchant for magnificent hush, and lets the tension between the two suspend the album in air.

And while I'm not sure if I've actually signed the papers yet, the new Shadow Gallery album, Tyranny, brings me as close as I've come to promoting a Magna Carta band to my first division. The timing is fortuitous: Dream Theater has begun to incline towards the mainstream, Fates Warning has let atmospheric composure take some of the metal edge off their playing, and Queensrÿche has strayed out of the genre entirely, which leaves me in a state of frenzied receptivity for a progressive-metal band who remember the powers of percussive bass (Queensrÿche's Empire is probably my vote for the best pounding-bass-guitar album in history), floridly symphonic song constructions grounded by power-chord guitar, joyously histrionic vocals, lyrics that go on for pages in an infinitesimal font, concept album ambitions that I would have dreamed of in high school but have since lost the nerve for, synthesizer bombast, incestuous guest-appearances, clunky character-acting, preening literacy, hopeless idealism, relentless paranoia and albums that go on until you're too drained to stand. Tyranny has all these qualities in irrepressible overabundance. Shadow Gallery play fast enough to make you glance at your CD player to see if the seconds are running faster than they're supposed to, the fourteen songs here (most of them long, naturally) crash through enough movements to make Mussorgsky edgy, and lead vocalist Mike Baker isn't as shrill as Geoff Tate but gives away nothing in drama. The text is a bitter indictment of the corporate soul of the Gulf War (a subject I thought the Call settled with "I don't think there are any Russians, / And there ain't no Yanks, / Just corporate criminals / Playing with tanks", but the wars keep happening), which Baker and bassist Carl Cadden-James humanize by following an exiled hacker out of the war-rooms into his spiritual re-awakening. Dream Theater singer James LaBrie wanders in for a song, and Linda Jaeger supplies the duet part on the mournful "Spoken Words". Shadow Gallery don't make anything remotely resembling a concession to non-prog-metal fanatics, but if, like me, you miss the paranoid flamboyance of Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime and wish Dream Theater had never admitted to liking Journey, you wouldn't want them to.