From Melody Maker, January 31, 1998

Book-ended by silence "Mark Hollis" is a quiet album on a silent place, recorded with just a couple of microphones strategically placed to pick up every nuance and texture of a few musicians gently stepping their way through Hollis' painfully delicate songs.

Which is a million miles away from most people's memories of Talk Talk, the studio-bound multi-layered creation responsible for some of the Eighties' finest and most satisfying pop moments. It's tempting to say that with this solo album, Hollis has stripped out the Eighties from his songwriting, and what we're left with are the bare bones, the skeletal trees of melodies and songs, standing alone deep in uninhabited landscapes.

And there are the occasional echoes of Talk Talk here and there. Obviously, there's them man's voice. But where it was once fulsome and powerful, now it's cracked and quiet. Words are swallowed and underplayed, like the tremulous woodwind which breathes across much of the album. There's a hint at the fine, driving piano of the sublime 1986 hit, "Life's What You Make It" - the song which for most people is Talk Talk - and the temptation to bellow: "Babe! Life's what you make it" over the top is strong.

But the idea of "Mark Hollis" is just a stripped version of Talk Talk is hopelessly inaccurate. This is a whole new approach for him, the culmination of a couple of years' worth of writing for a woodwind quintet and the gradual winding down of Talk Talk from the full-blown Eighties lush pop act to the increasingly personal and understated beauty of 1991's "Laughing Stock". While that record was somewhat undermined by EMI's rehashing of old Talk Talk material and releasing a ghastly remix album, this one is emerging in a vacuum, naked and trembling.

Some of the arrangements might stir memories of animated Czechoslovakian folk tales and jar slightly to the ear tuned to the standard generic needs of the Nineties (guitars, drum machines, verses and choruses, please), but anyone who owns a Miles Davis album, has a soft spot for Led Zeppelin's earlier acoustic dabblings and likes a change of pace from time to time will find a gem which will keep unravelling on every listen. Tracks like "The Daily Planet", a brushed jazz cymbal-led tune of spine-tingling chords and some raw harmonica breaks, and "The Gift" - the first two bars of which will be sampled and turned into the template for a huge international rap hit before the millennium's out - lodge into the memory while somehow remaining deliciously fleeting.

Oh sorry, did I come over all "Jazz Club" there? Well, erm, nice.

Mark Roland

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Last updated February 12, 1998