And so, holding this new album in my hand after all, the severed wires of an abandoned telephone pole against a faded blue sky and the words In Search of Angels across the top, I am proud and grateful and terrified enough that for a moment I forget there are any other emotions, start to forget that physical balance isn't an emotional function. "I'm alive again on a Maymorning", the album opens, and in a breath I know this is how the seasons changing will sound to me from now on. One era ends and another begins. Of course another era begins; how could I ever have imagined it wouldn't? If Runrig hadn't made another record, somebody else would have, so why shouldn't they stick around to see that it's done right? Donnie's disarmingly earnest voice was perfectly suited to Runrig's aesthetic, but the band's charisma was an ensemble effect, not his doing. He didn't write songs or play instruments, and it seems to me that his departure coincided with the end of an era more than it caused it, and that replacing him, however regrettable a necessity, was less a matter of filling a void than filling a role. I don't have the sense, as I did when Fish left Marillion, that Donnie tore out part of the band's soul and took it with him as a vindictive souvenir, even though he ought to have known perfectly well that he'd never be able to operate it by himself. I think Donnie packed his cases and had one last look around, everything bare and white, his hat in his hand, like a wistful Vanessa Redgrave, and walked out across the gravel driveway to the waiting car.

New beginnings are supposed to be wobbly, that's part of their charm, and In Search of Angels has its share of uncertainty. Cape Breton singer Bruce Guthro, who takes over for Donnie, fits in with admirable aplomb, but I don't yet have the sense that he's part of the band, or vice versa. He didn't write these songs, either, but he's the band's most obvious new element, so he's bound to get blamed for how ordinary some of them sound. The slow ballad "Life Is Hard", sung in a different voice, could slip right into Jewel's Spirit somewhere. The measured, melancholy "This Is Not a Love Song" is closer to John Waite's "Missing You" than anything else I can think of. "Cho Buidhe Is a Bha i Riabh" wears its ethnic enthusiasm a little too brightly for my tastes, like the Peruvian pan-flautists busking outside the Harvard Square subway station, anxious to impress their exoticness upon Korean tourists who seem, frankly, to be experiencing enough cultural dissonance just from being caught in the crossfire of the endless affectionate barker's war between the two newsstands on either side of Mass Ave. "In Search of Angels" itself is reverent and elegant, but also a folk song whose mournful sighs could have come from American musical history as easily as from Scotland's. But Runrig had already begun, back on Mara, to tear down some of the fences they used to keep between themselves and the rest of the world, so I expect these songs would have sounded this way even without Bruce. I'm not sure exactly, in these moments, where Runrig thinks they're headed, but I long ago suspended judgment and agreed to follow them anywhere.

And besides, take those four songs away and you've still got two-thirds of a record to which nobody but Runrig could do justice. "Maymorning" is a ringing, open-hearted Celtic anthem, like Big Country's Stuart Adamson is always a little too self-conscious, and remembers the compromises of wakefulness too well, to write. "Ribhinn Donn" is plaintive and Gaelic, sung mostly by Rory Macdonald as a sensible alternative, I presume, to teaching Bruce the lyrics phonetically. Parts of the mid-tempo "Big Sky" remind me of Mark Cohn and Robbie Robertson, but the choruses launch themselves into the sun like nobody ever warned them about melting wings. "Da Mhile Bliadhna" is another in Runrig's long line of Gaelic terrace-anthems for a country in which the sports fans are thoughtful patriots, "A Dh'Innse Na Firinn" another in the nearly-as-long line of squarely implacable marching themes, a song I will try to teach my children before they have a chance to discover the hollow joys of counting beer bottles. "All Things Must Change" sparkles with Malcolm Jones' pealing guitar, like a Dire Straits that never heard of New Orleans or MTV. The atmospheric "Travellers", with its haunting backing choir, picks up a thread begun by the b-side orchestral reworking of Mara's "The Mighty Atlantic". This album's masterpiece for me, though, and so far my favorite song of the year by a wide margin, is the first single, "The Message". None of the individual ingredients are especially new. The twirling guitar-, accordion- and pipe-hooks are centuries old in essence, and have been adapted to rock many times before by Big Country and Runrig themselves. The murmuring synth-bass/drum-loop foundation is a minor variation on one they invented for Mara. The rhythm-guitar charge in the choruses is basically the same one that propels every second song in Runrig's repertoire, and the text is Runrig's favorite theme, the infinite patience with which the landscape tolerates our frenetic disregard and then gently reminds us of our immortality. But ah, who could possibly resent these touches' recurrence? Lots of people, I suppose intellectually, but with this song playing I stop thinking about individual tastes and start thinking that this is the way all rock songs should sound, the form finally perfected after decades of erratic progress, or perhaps how all songs should sound, the culmination of centuries. What music rouses you so thoroughly that you can't concentrate on anything but the elusive convictions that the universe is sensibly ordered, and that your place within it is good? This is mine.

The BBC-session disc to which the collection is attached is a stranger amalgamation. Its first four tracks are recordings from a 1989 radio appearance, "Protect and Survive", "Hearts of Olden Glory", an electric rendition of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" (originally done as a b-side to the Searchlight single "News From Heaven"), and the The Cutter and the Clan road-/love-song "The Only Rose". These all sound fine, but the studio versions sounded fine too, and these don't add much. The rest of the disc is from a 1996 Glasgow concert, and hearing a Scottish audience's fanaticism is part of the magic of Once in a Lifetime, but Transmitting Live, the second Runrig live album, was just done in 1994, so this set is necessarily less surprising, and perhaps inevitably my favorite parts of it are the four songs from Mara, which postdates the other two live albums, especially the humble, shuffling performance of "The Dancing Floor", although the acoustic-guitar/rhythmic-applause/bagpipe intro to "Healer in Your Heart" is also very nice, and I'll gladly take ten more versions of "(Stepping Down the) Glory Road", if somebody is hoarding them somewhere.

The second half of the record is Fish's first post-Marillion attempt at an epic suite, the six-part "Plague of Ghosts". The meditative opening, "Old Haunts", is the way Marillion might also have begun, during Fish's tenure or even now, but "Digging Deep" is jittery and clipped, like a funk-metal Joe Jackson. "Chocolate Frogs" is a muttering ambient collage over which Fish reads, then howls, a monologue that appears to be about drug addiction, although I can't quite discern whether the drugs, for which the chocolate frogs are a metaphor, are the subject or are themselves a metaphor for some deeper personal problem. A skittering drum-and-bass underpinning goads "Waving at Stars", and I keep expecting it to explode into catharsis, but the resolution is deferred through the gradual build-up of "Rain Gods Dancing" and another sultry, preparatory minute or two of "Wake-Up Call (Make It Happen)", and when it does arrive, it's nowhere near as heroic as I expected. Examining the lyrics, though, I see that this makes sense. This is a story of awakening, and so it ends not with triumph or rapture but with quiet and slightly bleary determination. The self-help-mantra repetition of "We can make it happen", with which the suite concludes, is a long way from the polysyllabic rants of Script for a Jester's Tear and Fugazi, the delirious love poetry of Misplaced Childhood or the drunken loneliness of Clutching at Straws, but Fish sounds like he believes it, like perhaps he owes it his life. We must be willing to try, the raingods suggest, things that seem to be against our nature. Our nature, after all, may be precisely our problem.

The Fish incarnation of Marillion produced a handful of important b-sides, most of which were compiled once on B'Sides Themselves, but in the new catalog order that collection is basically obsolete, and the b-sides are distributed across the bonus discs for the contemporaneous albums, although the use of subtly different versions means that completists will still want both. The bonus disc for Script for a Jester's Tear gets two versions of the definitive early battle-hymn single "Market Square Heroes", the histrionic "Three Boats Down From the Candy", the sprawling nineteen-minute excursion "Grendel" (perhaps Marillion's answer to Spinal Tap's "Jazz Odyssey"), demo versions of the album tracks "Chelsea Monday" and "He Knows You Know", and the halting "Charting the Single", which has one of the most charmingly inept drum-machine loops in my awareness. The bonus tracks match the album's demeanor, relentlessly overthought and fundamentally uncooperative, but slipping into hauntingly lyrical asides at odd moments. As with Kate Bush's first two albums, it took me a long time to learn to love these, and even now part of my fondness for them is rueful, hearing all the ragged edges that Marillion would later sand off, studying them like childhood photos of an adult crush, and never really hearing them, regardless of the mastering technology, because I can't clear my mind of what they would lead to.