Pages tagged “phish”

Take it or leave it, Phish at a peak

Total jammin' brodown or no, Phish's two-DVD Walnut Creek, recorded in July 1997, stays focused on the music. Five cameras, almost exclusively trained on the earnestly pretentious Vermont foursome, plus a poppingly mixed soundtrack make for (mostly) caveat-free hippie goodness. Even in digital fidelity, Phish is—by its standards—flawless.

My eyes and ears are twitching from the free fall of the U.S. economy. Somalian Pirates?!
Iceland bankrupt?! Hockeymom politicians?! Heck, the regular paper is reading like the Onion lately. Only more bizarre and apocalyptic. What better way to end the work week, then, but to procrastinate with some eye and ear candy?

* Letters To Cleo will reunite for 20th Anniversary Shows

Now, I pride myself on being a pure Masshole, but I somehow missed the era of LTC the first time around, so maybe it 's worth checking out:

LETTERS TO CLEO REUNION DATES 2008

November 8 - Los Angeles CA - The Roxy
December 8 - Boston MA - Paradise Rock Club
December 9 - Boston MA - Paradise Rock Club

(New York date in December to be added soon.)

* Singing Revolution: 

Very cool new documentary about how the small country of Estonia battled it's big bully neighbors using the power of song. 20k people singing the same song on film is amazingly powerful, Check out the trailer: http://www.singingrevolution.com/

* Urchin Animation

I have always had a massive soft spot for the trippy animation underwritten by the freaks over at the Children's Workshop (AKA: Sesame Street, Electric Company etc. etc.), so imagine my happiness when brother George sent over this new take on stop motion using a Javelin track. Hopefully we'll see it right after Elmo and before Big Bird sooner rather than later:

http://www.anatomatic.com/urchin.html

 * The Avett Brothers

The Gleam II is the single best collection of songs in the last twelve months hands down. It's addicitve. Rick Rubin is one lucky sonuvabitch to ink these guys. They are poised for a monster year in 09. Their set at Newport Folk was honest, inspiring and thrilling. 

* Phish Re-Unites 

Yes I am going to Hampton. Yes I am curious to see if these four can find the mojo once again. Yes Hampton Comes Alive is in the top three best titles for a Live Album of all time.

Lastly: Let's all take a moment to wish for the quick recovery of Mr. Jim James; the world needs flying V guitar players. 

An introduction to the loved—and loathed—jamband, on the occasion of its recently announced reunion...

Sure, some of their fans are obnoxious, stoned idiots. Rich-kid runaways strung out on MDMA and just enough misconstrued New Age philosophy to make them unbearably self-righteous. And, yes, the band’s hour-long atonal vamps on a song called “Tweezer” make most people want to take said grooming tool and remove their ear drums.

After dropping hints earlier this summer, Phish has announced plans to reunite for three dates in Hampton, Va. next March, with additional cities and venues to come later in 2009.

Update: In the midst of the rumor tidal wave, Phish keyboardist Page McConnell issued a personal letter about his thoughts on a Phish reunion. The letter, dated yesterday (June 26), says McConnell and his former bandmates have talked about "the possibility of spending some time together."

"Currently many of us have plans and projects already in the works," wrote McConnell, "most notably Mike [Gordon, Phish's bassist], who made a great album and is about to hit the road in support of it. Given that I might not even see some of the guys for the next six months, I would say that the announcement of a reunion is premature. However, later this year we hope to spend some time together and take a look at what possible futures we might enjoy."

McConnell also said he feels closer to his former bandmates now than ever before in their relationship. After the break up, the band members were not talking for about two years, McConnell says, but now the men are looking forward to seeing each other, "hopefully with no distractions."

(Thanks, brad!)
--

The waves of speculation surrounding a Phish reunion are growing steadily wider, newly encompassing über-producer Steve Lillywhite. According to a report at Jamtopia.com, a reunion is in the works and Lillywhite will be working with the beloved jam band in the studio. When? Soon, say the rumors, but there are no definite dates in the rumor pool.

There must be something in the bottled water that tour buses keep on board. It seems that Reunion Fever, already rampant, has claimed another victim in Phish's lead singer and guitarist, Trey Anastasio.

4.2.98 - Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, NY
4.3.98 - Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, NY
4.4.98 - Providence Civic Center, Providence, RI
4.5.98 - Providence Civic Center, Providence, RI

Jamband phenoms skip all over musical map

One of the finest live bands of all time, Phish was many things to many people; depending on the night, it could even be many different things to itself. And on the four-night “Island Tour,” it was everything. The band members had a collective case of hay fever, having spent the spring holed up in rehearsals and recording. But for four consecutive nights in April, they let it all hang out.

They were arena rockers. They were pranksters, entertainers and shamans (well, as much as four dorky white guys from Vermont could be). They played bluegrass, jazz, blues, rock—but by the fourth and final show, they’d explored most every other genre and were left with just funk. So after blowing everyone’s minds with their versatility, technical mastery, compositional genius and superhuman jamming, they decided they wanted to be the house band for a traveling dance party.

Whether you’re a diehard fan or just a passerby, any of these 12 discs—showcasing Phish at a vibrant peak—would make a fine addition to your collection.

This latest Phishing trip begins as you’d expect a Tchad Blake-produced record would— in a fog of creepy, bone rattling Waits-ian gothic rambling, pinging metallic hammers and loping, percussive grooves that claw their way through your forehead. What is this fantastically ghoulish noise? Will this, the band’s final record, be remembered as Phish’s Wild Years?

Better cast elsewhere. The promising opener quickly disintegrates, giving way to a tune that sums up everything that’s wrong with much of Phish’s latter-day work; the title track is lazy, nondescript jam funk that should’ve come with a warning: MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS, DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY WHILE LISTENING. Even the hyper-cool distorted Fender Rhodes and Blake’s subtly echoing sonic brushstrokes can’t salvage this song.

But just before the gravelly tug of the highway’s shoulder slides under my spinning tires, I’m jolted awake by a completely unexpected country/pop-rock jewel. Though lyrically deficient, “The Connection” is two minutes and 20 seconds of radio-ready, feel-good bliss. Some might have nightmare flashbacks of the band’s bunk bubble-gum ditty “Heavy Things” from 2000’s Farmhouse, but fear not; this new single actually works. It could be the type of improv-rock crossover hit “Runaround” was for Blues Traveler in the mid ’90s.

John Fishman keeps it rocking hard with his Gatling-Gun drum fills on “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing,” a solid approximation of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter.” This is some of the band’s best jamming on the album, with guitarist/frontman Trey Anastasio summoning up the raw musical fury of earlier Phish tunes like “Wilson,” “Llama” and “Horn.” The low-end sludge-rock interlude “Maggie’s Revenge” hearkens back to the opening track’s hints of a darker album that never emerges, and its fuzzed-out noise experimentation is reminiscent of "Riker’s Mailbox" (from 1994’s Hoist), not in sound, but in brevity and function.

Much of the rest of Undermind, however, is a damn-near perfect metaphor for Phish’s performances in recent years—moments of greatness sandwiched between bouts of mostly uninspired mediocrity. “Nothing” and “Two Versions of Me” are tired hippy rock, “Crowd Control” comes far too close to the aforementioned “Heavy Things,” and the quasi-Sinatra sentimentality of “Secret Smile” will leave you screaming for the quirky multi-part Phish epics of yore. But in the accompanying DVD (a short making-of-the-album film by Danny Clinch), the band explains away this new direction (or lack thereof) as “smallification”: a stripping-down, a departure from complexity in order to discover the essence of the band members’ musical personalities and their newly written songs—being “naked as possible,” as Anastasio says in the documentary.

Unfortunately, the results are largely disappointing. The band is capable of so much more in regards to composition, and longtime lyricist Tom Marhsall has always faired best when he wasn’t striving for profundity (hell, some of his finest work doesn’t make much sense at all). Here, he tries too hard. Or perhaps the band just doesn’t use its music to undercut the lyrics the way it used to, injectecting the words with sonic dashes of irony (see “Sparkle” from 1993’s Rift).

“Scents and Subtle Sounds” offers some consolation toward album’s end, and its outro builds nicely into a cascading sheet of sound, though it never quite reaches the majestic peak it begs.

So after all these years, is Phish really going out like this? In all fairness, the band’s decision to hang it up came after the recording was complete. But for all of the strange, captivating, beautiful and absurd music Anastasio, Fishman, Bassist Mike Gordon and keyboardist Page McConnell have created over the years, they leave us with one last nugget of pure, unadulterated weirdness—the closing track, “Grind.”

Barbershop quartet numbers like “Carolina” and “Hello My Baby” have been Phish concert staples for years. Sometimes the band would even hush up the audience and perform these songs without any amplification. And the bizarre a capella “Grind” is Phish’s successful attempt at capturing this generally overlooked part of its live canon in the studio. And the lyrics are vintage Phish:

Grind, Grind, Grind,
Grind, Grind, Grind, Grind
I can bend in sixty-eight ways
I have lived for twelve thousand days
Twenty-eight teeth inside of my head
Grind three types of things
and I’m sad that they’re dead
Grind, Grind, Grind,
Grind, Grind, Grind, Grind

And there you have it. A redeeming end to a not-so-impressive farewell record, from one of the most talented, original and enduring bands of the last 20 years. For better or worse, it’s time to put those poles back in the closet.

After 20-plus years together, improv-rock heroes Phish are calling it quits. The official announcement came on the brink of the band’s annual summer tour and with a new album on the way.

In a www.phish.com web post, frontman Trey Anastasio wrote, “Last Friday night, I got together with [bandmates] Mike, Page and Fish to talk openly about the strong feelings I've been having that Phish has run its course and that we should end it now while it's still on a high note. Once we started talking, it quickly became apparent that the other guys' feelings, while not all the same as mine, were similar in many ways—most importantly, that we all love and respect Phish and the Phish audience far too much to stand by and allow it to drag on beyond the point of vibrancy and health.

“We don't want to become caricatures of ourselves, or worse yet, a nostalgia act. By the end of the meeting, we realized that after almost twenty-one years together we were faced with the opportunity to graciously step away in unison, as a group, united in our friendship and our feelings of gratitude.”

Anastasio went on to write that the last show of the two-day festival in Coventry, Vt., this August would be Phish’s final performance. He also stressed that this time, it will not merely be a brief hiatus (the method by which the band attempted to rejuvenate itself between 2000 and 2002).

Said the band's lyricist Tom Marshall, "Of course I'm sad that Phish is breaking up, it's the end of an incredible era in so many ways. However, I'm extremely proud and happy for them and more relieved, really, than anything. It's great that they were able to walk away and end on a positive note, because the potential for other unhappier endings seemed to be increasing."

Singer/guitarist Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon and drummer John Fishman formed the band while attending the University of Vermont in the mid-1980s. Their first gig was an ROTC Halloween dance at the college. A few year’s later, pianist Page McConnell joined the band and the permanent lineup was in place. Phish then began its slow-climb to stardom, picking up steam with the release of the albums Hoist (1994), A Live One (1995) and Billy Breathes (1996). Its fanatical fanbase, which followed the group all over the country, grew larger and larger until Phish was consistently among the music industry's top-grossing live acts.

The band’s forthcoming studio album, Undermind—produced by Tchad Blake (Los Lobos, The Bad Plus, Tom Waits)—is still scheduled for a June 15 release by Atlantic Records.

Fans who’d like to catch Phish on their farewell tour can purchase tickets at phishtickets.rlc.net.

“It's been an amazing and incredible journey,” Anastasio wrote, closing his letter to fans. “We thank you all for the love and support that you've shown us.”

(From Beginning To End: Top - Phish's first promotional photo, 1988. Bottom - Phish at a 2002 photo shoot at Page McConnell's house in Vermont. Photo by Danny Clinch.)