Ugly Blog: Errata

Beck and I went through a few iterations to get the layout / design of her new blog, Cooking For Elaine, just right. Somewhere in there it became clear that The Ballad is "ugly." Comment then withdrawn, modified to "it's not what I would do." Eventually translated to "there's too much block text," then further translated to "your paragraphs are too long." Ah, I see where this is going.

In the interest of placating Beck, here's a little experiment. I have several blog posts in the works, all of which are undeveloped ideas that deserve big treatments that, really, it just seems I don't actually have the time to write. So in the interest of appealing to Beck's low-text, short paragraph aesthetic sensibilities*, here are several full posts that will never be, condensed to max-of-five-sentence paragraph form.

* - And this from a person who doesn't tweet!

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The Authenticity of The BS Report

I listen to Bill Simmons's podcasts regularly. In them, he interviews sports personalities, talks shop with various other ESPN personalities, phones his buddies to discuss the latest games, etc., all with a casual tone that gives off the impression that, aside from the occasionally bleeped swear word - this is an ESPN-ABC-Disney production, after all - the listener is experiencing what it would be like to just hang out with Bill. Given the usual gloss / subterfuge / simulacra that pervades most modern media*, the podcast feels like a last refuge, or maybe really a tech-enabled return, to authenticity: the real personality, the unfettered dialogue between these honest to earth, real people, who just happen to live high-profile lives. But then you realize they're recordings, undoubtedly edited and censored, and Simmons himself is giving near-constant indications that he is watching what he is saying due to the powers that be. So even the ostensible casual conversation requires the holding of tongues with quiet reservation, and even while e.g. listening to Seth Myers detail the behind the scenes of SNL skit-writing, the crushing clench of the postmodern spin forces me to wonder, per usual: what's crafted, and what's just crafted by casual tone so as to appear uncrafted?

* - Lame, vague term, I know. Hey, five sentences. It wasn't my idea.

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Jazz, Not Classical

Sprawl players, Hashem help them, cannot remember or successfully run plays to save their lives, yet they want and want plays with specific instructions for precisely what to do in this or that situation. It's borderline absurd, given that there's been no real indication that the plays would be followed even if people knew them, but the bigger problem is that the assumption that there is an exact thing-to-do in every given situation is fundamentally flawed. The expression we've come up for when players keep asking "what do I do when X" type questions is "Jazz Not Classical" - we've got a framework, and yes, sometimes there are definite cuts to make / notes to play, but a lot of it is creative improvisation from within the framework, following certain principles but having the freedom to adjust on the fly, in the moment. Cool metaphor, but it also uncovers a larger problem: we've got some players who don't, um, know their scales just yet. This is time number 42,376 in a teaching context where I've re-realized that my experience set does not match others, and we've got to make sure that a whole ton of fundamentals and background are in place before we can jam.

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Phish and the World Cup

When you listen to Phish jams, Trey is almost always way out front, wailing* o'er the top with incendiary melody lines on his Languedoc guitar, and it's very, very easy to fixate so much on that sound that the remainder of the band sounds like vamping. In soccer... someone has the ball. A way to experience both in a different, perhaps more enlightening light, is to do everything it takes to fixate on the whole instead - in the jam, you can aid yourself by making a concerted** effort to listen to bass and piano and the experience of the whole will just click; on the pitch, try paying attention to the shapes the defenses and offenses make rather than watching the players as individual entities. In short, feel the ball and the guitar more than observing them directly, and both art forms will breathe in a new way. I am becoming increasingly convinced that mainstream popular American sports and music taste are fixated on the former approach, locking in on the lead, and as this vantage gets its kicks from searing notes and goals, it doesn't seem very likely that low-scoring soccer or jam/jazz will overtake football or Taylor Swift anytime soon.

* - "Wailing," not "whaling," for you Mr. Miner readers out there.

** - "Concerted." I kill me.

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The Existential Bench-Press

My favorite memory of high school football, or rather my memory of the best feeling I had during my four years playing high school football, is one that occurred repeatedly - the five minute walk to my car away from the locker room at 6:30 after practice each day. That little five minute window put the maximum amount of time between me and the next time I would have to be back at the locker room, hunkering down, putting on pads and inexplicably putting myself through the nastiness of another day of physically and psychologically torturous CHS football. I bring it up because sometimes at the gym, after that last rep on the bench, or after the forty-fifth (or sixtieth or thirtieth, depending on the day) minute on the elliptical, I catch a brief whiff of that same feeling - I've put maximum time between myself and the next grueling workout. This is a weird thought to have, in particular, leading up to those last few bench presses; hard to keep moving that maximum weight for the day when your orientation is completely towards not doing it any more. All of this points to the necessity of constant renewed goal-setting lest your routine become Sisyphean, but it also points to the following section - if every action is oriented towards other goals, be they Ultimate or pleasure or health or whatever, wherein lies the "real" value?

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Zeal & Anosmia

Whence the drive to do things? Zeal for particular pursuits, like the locus of love or the origin of creative ideas, seems to be one of those mysterious rooted-in-nothing things that nonetheless explains everything. I have been kicking around the idea of a very, very loose framework of a novel entitled Anosmia in which a character goes into surgery to get his sense of smell repaired with the intention of enhancing his worldly experience only to inadvertently destroy whatever the fount of zeal is. This is clearly Smelltardian kinds of autobiographical, as I both can't smell and sometimes (like more people than will admit, I suspect) my zeal drops out - I look at the expanse and just don't have an inkling, an inherent "calling" or whathaveyou, of what to pursue. I kinda feel like the Anosmic lead has limited options in the achieve enlightenment, give up entirely or press-through-in-a-constant-state-of-frustration trichotomy, and I'm definitely leaning toward the latter. In the meantime, fear not, I dig Ultimate, music, and school and philosophy and all kinds of things - I suppose *I* can still smell a bit*, though that probably doesn't make for very interesting reading.

* - Beck would agree - ZING ME!

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The Wire Has a Fat Detective, You May Have Noticed

The Wire is, by all reports, the height of television quality, and it is for many reasons excellent - tight story lines ("too tight?" asks Beck), stellar performances, and an avoidance of expository dialog that evokes an attitude of respect for the brainspace of the viewing audience. Still, it's rife with preposterous elements - the constant eating / porn-mag reading of the fat detective, the overt greying of the stressed-out mayoral candidate's hair, the exaggerated "Omar lives by a CODE!" emphasis, the McNultian "I've cleaned up my act!" smirks - that force me to ask WHY DO THAT? I recognize my tendency to nitpick, I suppose the things that sore-thumb here are more indicative of the relative health of the rest of this excellent show, and we admittedly are only partway through season 4, so maybe the best is yet to come. But for all The Wire's composition and refined, near-Shakespearean air, there are still these cringe-worthy moments that jar the experience. So much is smartly left unsaid, why say these obvious things?

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Frustration, Aggravation Is Getting to You

I fight on a daily basis not to have my selfhood defined by frustration; I lose often. Beck called me on one of my WHY DO THAT? rants the other day regarding the healthcare provided on campus - the details are unimportant, but I was irked that they were basing so much of their thinking on a test with obviously confounding variables - and she's right, I get aggravated at these little mistakes and it dictates the remainder of the experience for me. So I can watch that and try to acc-entuate the positive. But what do you do about e.g. the intractable problem of trying to teach undergrads that are missing their second grade skills? I am meta-frustrated at how I am supposed to deal with pursuing a career that seems to involve a lot of farce on its educational side; that is all.

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The Data-Driven Life / The Reframing Capacity of Obsession

In the midst of all my calorie-counting, food diary-keeping adventures, Jenny pointed me in the direction of this article about, as it's called, "The Data-Driven Life." This little sub-post is really just a link, as it's an interesting little article. But I'm struck by the article's blase dismissal of the shift in framing that occurs when one alters one lifestyle so as to accommodate all that number-crunching. True, the effectiveness of all that data tracking is remarkable, but that tracking alters the way you experience the world, and it's unclear to me how you even begin to weigh that as a benefit v. cost - seems like you would need to, not to use the idea twice in two paragraphs, develop tracking for the tracking. I just know that I spend some non-zero amount of time each day looking at nutrition labels, and more important than the time lost is the way it has reframed my everyday experience - I don't know how to begin to evaluate whether the "health" I've gained is worth the unquantifiable alteration in my subjective experience of food and meals.

* - You could raise a similar point about blogging a life vis a vis living it. You *could.*

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Flags of Our Fathers

Requires a pic:

We have an Arizona flag hanging off the newly mounted flagpole on the front of our house. Now, some of you know what this is about: CBS Southwest is just carrying on the vexillological traditions of one iPJ, no further meaning intended, other than perhaps a generalized appreciation for our now home-state. But if you're not one of those in the know - more specifically, if you're a Phoenician passerby - you may be tempted to see this as some kind of ardent support of Arizona. And, you know, its laws. Outside of onomatopoeia, acontextual words are pretty meaningless; what about flags?

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Phew. There you go. Hope you found that interesting and/or more aesthetically pleasing. Now it's time to reorient myself to another value backing a goal worth pursuing. Until next time...

Sending Our Love Down the (Not) Well

I am seated in the living room with iodined cotton fuzz on both arms, placating the dogs with rawhide chewies and not-really-all-that-eagerly awaiting LeBron's 6 PM announcement. Oh, and I'm celebrating, sort of, the ten year anniversary of the first summer I got certifiably Phish-hooked and followed their tour online on a day-by-day basis. I'm not going to full-on album review the show, but just so you get a proper environmental image, here's the setlist of a show from ten years ago today, a show that was conveniently enough immortalized - more than all of their shows have been immortalized - as Live Phish 05:

Saturday, 07/08/2000 Alpine Valley Music Theatre, East Troy, WI

Set 1: Punch You In the Eye > NICU, My Soul, Poor Heart, Wolfman's Brother, First Tube, Llama, Guyute, Run Like an Antelope

Set 2: Heavy Things, Piper -> Rock and Roll, Tweezer -> Walk Away, Twist, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Possum

Encore: Suzy Greenberg > Tweezer Reprise

We're in the midst of the instrumental composition "First Tube" right now. This show was a weird selection for the series - there's nothing that really screamed "of your 1000+ shows, you should definitely make this one one of the first six you release officially!" - but they did, and despite the controversy at the time (dooooood, 1994!!!??!?), it's a good representative of a standard show from that summer of 2000. So it's effectively taking me back to happy times with Beck and Zil and driving to Toronto and Ohio to catch Les Boys - ah, memories. I'll give an in-depth take on the whole release at some point, probably in 2047 at the rate I've been reviewing albums recently, but for now, trust that it's a breezy pleasant soundscape on an otherwise 112 degree day.

(Interruption - it's 6:11, and I still don't know where LeBron's headed. Tres betrayal - they said it would be announced within the first 10 minutes! When will I learn?)

Back to the fuzz... as mentioned, I've been feeling intermittently energy-less lately. Well, "intermittently" became "constantly" a little over a week ago - just have been having bouts of a gasless tank at random moments in the day, with my peaks being in, I don't know, the 70% range. Not good - hard to do much of anything for more that ten minutes at a time, and on occasion I get that weird, going to fall over feeling. I'm not dizzy, not feeling faint, don't even really feel week, just feel like I'm dragging badly.

(Miami, btw. Yawn. I suppose this flagrant dis to Cleveland isn't all that yawn, but otherwise, this has been an encapsulation of everything annoying re: ESPN-esque supercoverage).

I'll cut to the chase - docs are pretty convinced I've got mono or valley fever or something of that ilk, so it's something that's more tremendously annoying than it is serious. So no reason for concern - all the appropriate values continue to be normal (after three rounds of bloodwork now), physical exam is normal, yada x 3. The recommended remedy is rest, don't take NSAIDS, and don't push myself to exhaustion in Ultimate or workouts. That last part has not been a problem lately, as this continued bout of low energy was actually somewhat well timed. With the holiday weekend, all things Ulty were canceled last weekend, which has given me a solid twelve days between events. And I've skipped three workouts in a row, too - I'll pay for that later, ugh - but mayhaps all the rest will do my fatigue some good and will have the added bonus of knee relief. This is me being positive about the situation.

Refocusing - I saw the doc for followup today, and he wanted to do a blood culture to rule out anything really strange. And blood cultures require 1, an iodine-sterilized draw, and a lot of blood. So NATCH I got Susie Rookie Phlebotomist. And despite my gigantic, ropey veins, she stuck and stuck and stuck me and hummed her favorite Neil Young tune off Harvest as she bruised the Bathsheba out of my arm. In her defense, the iodine makes skin incredibly sticky, and if the container gets stuck on the skin, the needle is that much harder to navigate. Anyways, she eventually called in Kathy Has-Done-This-Before Phlebotomist, who used another vein on the left arm, and they collaborated to draw a tube from my right arm for a blood culture as well. They put cotton and gauze over all three holes before I got up - purple gauze, so I looked like a mummified Suns player* or something - and when I tried to take it off at home, the cotton stuck all over the iodine. So here he sits, fuzzy was he, and my arms still hurt from the needle swishing. Boohoo, I know.

* - Here's to refraining from making the obvious Steve Nash and lots of bandages joke, which surely would have reminded everyone that I am from San Antonio, home of NBA Champions.

Anyways, just thought I'd give a little health update since I had casually mentioned that I'd been sickly lately. I've been pretty frustrated with this, btw, as the symptoms are all pretty vague and cause me to reflect on how energetic I'm feeling 20,000 times per day. I constantly have to convince myself that I'm not faking, and this is not just some elaborate psychosomatic ploy to get away from workouts. Speaking of, it also feels like the work I've done at the gym is being swallowed up by lethargy, and there's nothing I can really do about it. I want to get my exercise in, but I'm pretty tapped out by just walking the dogs in the morning and doing a little cooking. I've tried to do some pushups just to see if there's any chance I have something for a given day, and around #5 I get predictably woozy. So it seems that all that can be done now is to take 'er easy and try to get some work done from the prone / seated position. Walking from my car to the office has been quite a drag, so I'm going to do stuff from home if at all possible. I do have some Sprawl stuff coming up, so I'll do my best to play a limited amount and not push it too much... which, as you can probably guess, will be quite difficult for me.

Ugh. I suppose there are worse things in the world, but having your vital force sucked out kinda, um, yeah, you get it. So apologies if things have a dragging tone of late, and if I'm at all unkind, trust that it's only my body / not my mind / that is confusing things. Here's to rest and rallying; wish me luck, and hope this spell doesn't cause me to fall even farther behind in my work. It was supposed to be the summer of George, etc.

Yes I Am Stumbling...

I *promise* I will write something substantive in the next few. I'm neck deep in exams, papers, the usual right now. But this forced me to take a five second break to post. Enjoy:

Smiles!

The Phish Summer Tour is not coming particularly close to my digs (Berkeley, CA, and Telluride, CO, are the two closest locations). In the meantime, though:

Yay!

AR: The Black Album

Jay-Z - The Black Album (2003)

Having reviewed the White and with the Grey in the queue (by Frankian request), the necessary step is to review the Black to get my palette in order. The Black Album is Jay-Z's 2003 "farewell" album, a closing act that turned out to be a few shades shy of Brett Favre on the dishonest retirement scale. Jay-Z would go on to do more solo work (DUH, unless you haven't been around a television or a radio or a gym or any of the bajillion places that have blared "Empire State of Mind" the past few months), but his magnanimous legacy had already been well sealed in 2003. Had this indeed been his curtain call, it would have been an epic exit - not only did he bring out ten producers to supply his varied anthemic beats, he churned out a biopic that retread the ground of his "rags to riches" story in gigantic, quasi-presidential-memoirs fashion. It's the rare case of braggadocio backed up by performance - Jay-Z is certainly not one lacking ego or an overdeveloped sense of scale, but the flow/rhythm/witticisms here are in top form. It's just a great rap record, one of his best with or without the years that followed, and a grandiose performance to match the mythic figure behind it. While it (intentionally) is not dripping with the singles of some of his other efforts, it is top to bottom solid with few weak moments, and a quartet of lead songs that stand up with the canon of hip-hop classics.

One thing that's exceedingly nice about this hip-hop album is what it lacks: skits. Far be it from me to criticize a genre convention, but even some of the pinnacle achievements of rap are littered with minute and a half comedy fillers that miss way more often than they hit (and even when they hit are good for a laugh only the first few listens). Jay-Z doesn't waste time there at all, just hits the beats and songs, a great move imho. The album does stick to other epic hip-hop event conventions: it begins with a minute and a half fade-in intro and ends on the obligatory name-checking extended outro. But neither of these feels tacked on. The former is a smooth electronic piece that introduces the themes of finality via spoken word sentiment. The latter works as a kiss-goodbye song in its own stead, serving less as film credits than closure. I struggle to review hip-hop albums because it's not really my home musical territory*, but this album scores points with me from the get-go for dodging some of the more cumbersome traits of the form.

* - For the obvious reasons - see "white suburbanite Texan," etc. - but also because I really didn't get into hip-hop at all until about 2002 or so, and constantly feel like I'm missing things or being over susceptible to hooks. I mean, sure, in the '90s I heard the singles, and I was familiar with youthful masters of ceremony and knew whom the ladies love, but sitting down with whole hip-hop albums didn't really happen until post Tuftsmen years.

The first song proper, "December 4th," is one of the more preposterous songs out there. It's all the more impressive for being pulled off in spite of its ridiculousness. "12.4" starts with Jay-Z's mom talking about his birth, including how much he weighed (10 pounds 8 oz.) and that he "was the only one of [her] five children who did not cause [her] pain at birth." Right ... unclear whether he rode his blue ox to kindergarten, too. These biographical snippets are interspersed with Jay-Z's own account of his drug-dealing early years and move to the rap industry - all of this is delivered over a lush strings and girl group Specter-ish backing that is hilariously big in scope. It's hard to know what to say about this - the whole endeavor is Mt. Olympus over-the-top, but it somehow works. Apparently bad-assness transcends cheese - who knew? The song is followed by "What More Can I Say," another Motown-Soul-backed "I'm the best" diatribe that winds down to the retirement threat. The track opens with lines from friggin' Gladiator, as though the "larger than life" label needed even more emphasis. The track kills, and the two together serve as a huge opening to the disc.

There are two other giant numbers on the disc. At track 6, "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" uses a Timbaland futuristic synthesized club beat to drive a pulsing ego-number with a sick chorus. This song would be memorable enough on its own, but the fact that its signature "move" was referenced by arguably somebody bigger than the HOVA himself during the primaries:

has pretty much entrenched this as a hip-hop classic. Try to leave those analytic thoughts about the President "feelin' like a pimp" aside; the defiant sense of rolling with punches is the meat here.

The other stellar track on The Black Album is the fantastic (if misogynist*) "99 Problems." Perhaps the only rap song that meets Bruce Dickinson's cowbell requirements, this is a booming rap-rock tune that throws impressive wordcraft over Billy Squier's thunderous power chord samples. The first verse starts the insanity: "I got the rap patrol on the gat patrol / Foes that wanna make sure my casket's closed / Rap critics they say he's "Money Cash Hoes" / I'm from the hood, stupid, what type of facts are those? / If you grew up with holes in your zapatos / You'd be celebrating the minute you was havin' dough." Tight! The second verse gives an account of a DWB incident; it's brilliant and worth citing in its entirety:

The year's '94 and my trunk is raw / In my rear view mirror is the mother fuckin' law / I got two choices y'all pull over the car or (hmmm) / Bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor / Now I ain't tryin' to see no highway chase with Jay / Plus I got a few dollars i can fight the case / So I...pull over to the side of the road / I heard "Son do you know why I'm stoppin' you for?" / 'Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low? / Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don't know / Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo'? / "Well you was doin fifty-five in a fifty-fo'/ License and registration and step out of the car / Are you carryin' a weapon on you? I know a lot of you are" / I ain't steppin out of shit, all my paper's legit / "Well, do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?" / Well my glove compartment is locked so is the trunk in the back / And I know my rights, so you gon' need a warrant for that / "Aren't you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or somethin'? / Or somebody important or somethin'?" / Nah, I ain't pass the bar but i know a little bit / Enough that you won't illegally search my shit / "We'll see how smart you are when the K9 come" / I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one.

He does seem to be assuming that the K9 will be male, but we'll let it slide; it's a smoking dialog and one of my favorite rap verses ever. "99 Problems" is buried on side two but is the cream of the album, imho.

* - Of course, this would be instance number 137529 of the term "bitch" being thrown about to refer to women generally, a questionable trend in the rap vernacular and one that will always make me cringe on some level. The "misogynist vocabulary as term of endearment" oddly gets a little clarification in this tune, as Jay-Z later refers to another "'ho" but then clarifies crudely "not a 'ho in the sense of having a pussy / but a pussy having no goddamn sense." It turns out he's not talking about a woman at all, but a all-bark-no-bite gangster (whom he later refers to as "he.") Still, clearly no feminist ground is being broken here, and you'd be justified if you wanted to dismiss the whole work on the basis of those lines alone. Jay-Z appeared with Phish in Brooklyn a few years back, and there was quite a buzz about the hippies from Vermont bringing a lyrical misogynist up to share the love and fun stage. I'm still not entirely sure where the right place to stand is - as I have mentioned with e.g. G'n'R, it seems that one can divorce condoning the attitude while appreciating the artistic depiction of that very attitude. That's pretty slippery ground to tread on, though. So maybe the real point of bring this up is buyer-beware: Jay-Z engages in a lot of the unpleasantries of hip-hop, though not as much as some, and if that will perturb you then you should steer clear.

There are plenty of other highlights - the Kanye-produced "Encore" is an invigorating live-sounding horn-backed number that includes the claim that Jay-Z is "rap's Grateful Dead" as well as a mention of "when I come back like Jordan, wearing 45" which sort of contradicts the whole "closing act" claim (and is an awesome in-the-know reference to MJ's 1996 jersey number). "Public Service Announcement" is shwank effrontery, and as mentioned, the closing track "My 1st Song" is a rhythmically intricate sly-off over a reverbing guitar line. "Justify My Thug" samples Madonna (!!!) as Jay invokes his former imposing persona, and "Lucifer" dances all over a Jamaican sample that evokes steel drums without even using them. I'll refrain from writing a sentence about every track, but really, what I'm leaving off as "non-highlights" are all solid work with rich beats, too.

That's really an apt phrase - The Black Album is "rich." Lots of varied styles going on, all serving the same general "I'm the best ever, goodbye" narrative, all immediate and memorable. The variety of stars producing for Jay-Z here definitely enforce the "this is royalty" atmosphere. And there's a reason Jay-Z's king: he raps with a voice that is very upfront, easily understood and adorned with all kinds of clever quips and turns of phrase. He was (and certainly thought he was) the best in this era, and at least part of his power sits neatly in this ability to be accessible to even non-hip-hop fans. With the thorough qualification that I probably *am* one of those non-hip-hop fans, this is a great, thoroughly enjoyable hip-hop album, an appropriate send-off for one of the genre's artistic giants, even if it didn't turn out to be the real last verse. Definitely worth your time.

Status: Recommended
Nyet's Fave: "99 Problems"

Oh, and I can't help myself - this joke was suggested by Nyet as a slogan for the ASU Center for Biology and Society. It was, natch, rejected:

AR: Undermind

Phish - Undermind (2004)

Yeck. The phrase "Phish 2004" is one of those ugly things that I don't like hearing. Like "Yep, you've torn your second ACL," "Proposition 8 has passed,"or "2003 NLCS Game 6."

"What are 'Things that make me vomit?', Alex?"

2004 was the year Phish called it quits, but it's worse than that - the whole year was a descent into badness, with the band stumbling out to some lackluster shows, Trey playing an odd-sounding, compressor-less guitar, and a general sense that the Beast had outgrown itself and was dying of dino-cancer. Trey and Page announced in May that the band was going on indefinite hiatus / quitting for good, so the entire summer had a damper on it, a gutsick feeling. It culminated in the do-not-tell-me-otherwise worst performance of Phish's career in their closing shows at the flooded, traffic-bound, muddy travesty of a send-off that was Coventry. I listened to those shows in simulcast from home on my computer and my memory is that they were TERRIBLE - missed notes, flat energy, out of tune instruments, hellacious, embarrassing incompetence. I think you get the point; 2004 was DARK TIMES. And I wasn't exactly having a swimming go of it either - I had indeed torn my second ACL in the winter of that year and was still mired in the misery of med school, leaving me with studying, a reconstructive surgery, PT, no Ultimate, and nary a quality Phish moment to save the day* as the burning memories of MMIV. As you might anticipate, the cover of Undermind is associated with all the negative feelings of that particular period, and so out of the gate I'm not exactly going to be in love with the thing - the band's breakup announcement preceded the disc's release by a month or so, and I remember tearing the plastic wrap off the CD case with an already dejected air.

* - To be fair, I did catch a pair of entertaining if not musically stellar shows on 8.10 and 8.11 in Mannsfield, MA. Among other things, Trey stopped the show during the second night to poll the band on whether Fishman tunes (ridiculous numbers that feature the drummer's awful lead vocals and vacuum solos) were show-makers or breakers. Mike TPB Gordon replied, "On a scale of two to three, I give it a three." Priceless.

Well, that's not really fair - it sounds like I'm judging a studio album for the sad mayhem that surrounded it and not on its own merit. Well, let's see. Undermind, unlike its predecessor Round Room, was written / conceived / released in more typically Phishy fashion in part - as I mentioned in the Joy review, the seeming "right way" for a Phish album to come out was to have the songs worked on the road and then recorded, or at least showcased live before the album version came out. About half the tunes on Undermind had debuted the previous summer / fall, but - and this is a sign of the ungood to come - they didn't really excite me AT ALL when I heard them on the first iteration. They in fact sounded like the work of a band that had hit the creative wall, churning out something borderline average-adult contemporary, or maybe even formulaic in the simple-jam-vehicle rut that peppered the lesser moments of Farmhouse. And the ones that didn't fit that mold were slow, saccharine ballads that belonged nowhere near a Phish stage - I was interested to see if they would hold up on disc (with string embellishment and hopefully cleaner guitar and such), but the consensus in the summer of '03 was that, for example, "Secret Smile" was good only as a time holder for the listener to go grab a beer. So another strike against Undermind was that the known new material was lackluster, and the thought of music that is lackluster live performed in the not-typically-Phish's-strong-suit studio setting did not exactly inspire high expectations.

The nice surprise, then, of Undermind was that the newest of the new songs - i.e., the ones that had not been showcased yet - fit a consistent solid pop mode that breathed some peppy life into the album. The title track is a funky upbeat word-game number that hits a sweet pop stride in its easily-extended saunter. It's a breezy jam out that also crackles with rhythm. "The Connection" is simple, bright, acoustic-driven bliss - the tune has just a touch of sadness that lends itself to some nostalgic reflection in the midst of the inevitable hippie-twirling that would accompany it. "Nothing" is similar, speeding out of a tape effect into a ride-along bubbly riff, giving the lymbic equivalent of holding your hand out a car window as you zip through the auto-created wind. This trio of songs, spread across the disc, are the undoubted highlights for me - all smooth, all beaming, all nice craft that showed the mature songwriting potential of Phish rather than its proclivity to fall back on skeletal songs that permit later improv art. Phish also pulls off a neat trick with an ominous intro-version take of "Scents and Subtle Sounds," a mysterious little ditty that opens the disc and seems to match the original tune in lyrics only. The versions bookend the album (more or less), making for some neat album structure if nothing else.

The rest of the new cracks are a mixed bag. "Crowd Control" also tries that bright pop path, but stumbles severely on its "The time has come for changes / Do something or I will" sentiment. It's a quasi-political statement, maybe a joke, but regardless, it falls flat. "Maggie's Revenge" is a mundane noise-fest in the middle of the disc born of a jam; it's nowhere near as menacing as it pretends to be. "Access Me" is a decent enough Mike goof-tune, though not as good as his own Inside-In solo work, and "Tomorrow's Song" is an oblique "Graceland" homage that skitters by repeating lines over and over, coming off as toss-off filler. "Grind," actually not a new song but an a capella reworking of an old tune, fares a little better, functioning as a silly barbershop close to the disc. It's a novelty bit, though, and not the sort of the thing an album should rest on.

Ah, but then there are those already-been-played tunes. Of them, "Scents and Subtle Sounds" is the best rehash, bringing explosive energy to the version played in the summer of '03 and providing the middle of this disc with some fire. The opening descending licks and transition to the opening verse are genuinely hair-raising, as is the ensuing well-composed run - this is more of a composed song that has a space for jamming than a tune for which th esole purpose is to be a jam key. "A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing" is solid here if not specacular - the improv within is quite firey, but its murky psychedelic case just doesn't excite me that much. This one, in the summer of '04, became quite the stunner, but here the composed sections fall a little flat - yet another tick for the "you have to hear them live to get them" column.

From there, things crash badly. "Army of One" is an overly strained, melodramatic piano ballad from Page that comes across super-cheesy in concert and only comes off marginally better here. "Secret Smile" is improved somewhat over it's grab-a-draft concert status by added strings, but it's still a too-slow, whisper-sung ballad that teeters on mundane. This is not Trey's best vocal register, and while the instrumentation is quite pretty, it doesn't cohere very well. Finally, "Two Versions of Me," a mid-tempo ballad-rocker - I guess - marginally improves the god-awful concert version, but remains annoying as all hell. It's got an incredibly clumsy lyric / vocal part, and ends on a counting down segment that causes me to reach for the temple-stabbing fork. It's bad - sappy, too earnest, and fairly repetitive taboot.

There's an echo of other break-up albums here - songs are more obviously "Page-," "Mike-" or especially "Trey-" tunes than ever before. The awkwardness of a loss of team-conceived ideas is apparent. And they don't work well this way - the magic of Phish quite plainly lies in its interaction, and in 2004, this didn't seem to function as well. That may be an overly simplistic take - I've watched the making-of DVD that came with this disc, and there aren't obvious signs that the band isn't getting along or that Yoko's sitting on Mike's amp or anything. But Undermind, like Round Room, is messier, more frayed and fraught with missteps than the albums from before the first hiatus. It has ended up being a sad monument to the near-demise of my favorite band, and that combined with the large amount of ho-hum and outright bad music* on it keep it out of my player. Don't get me wrong - the gems I mentioned are just that, and it's not like Phish suddenly forgot how to play their instruments. But calling this purple blemish solid would, you know, make me want to throw up.

* - Okay, I may be exaggerating. But it's bad relative to their other output, blah blah blah the usual.

Status: Not Recommended
Nyet's Fave: "The Connection"

ADDENDUM: But wait - that was "near-demise!" The coda to the sad tale of Undermind is that the "permanent hiatus" improbably ended, and things are clicking once again. And yes, I'm just as happy about it now as I was in September. I know, I know, shut up already! Sorry. The other nice thing is that some of these Undermind tunes, my favorites in particular, didn't really get played much in 2004 if at all. So they are up for reinterpretation in '09 and '10 and beyond in a big way. There's hope yet! They've only been dusted off a handful of times thus far, but e.g., the 11.29 "Undermind" absolutely COOKED. So don't write off this work completely - just hope that the next time I catch a show, they don't play "Two Versions" or "Army." UGH.

ADDENDUM II: And I neglected to mention ... you gave your purported last album a cover featuring the four faces of the band in isolate? Boo-urns.

The Album Review Depository

It's about time I did this. For your convenience, or probably more precisely, mine, alphabetized by album title (my way) and available via link from the top right of the blog ... please utilize your control-f to find the artists / albums you seek.

N.B.: Reviews marked with *** are mini-reviews that may or may not see their completion in the never-reached future.

DESERT ISLAND DISCS

Appetite for Destruction (Guns n' Roses)
The Beatles [The White Album] (The Beatles)
Blood on the Tracks (Bob Dylan)
Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd)
Embryonic (The Flaming Lips)
Exile on Main Street (The Rolling Stones)
Head Hunters (Herbie Hancock)
Live / Dead (The Grateful Dead)
Loaded (The Velvet Underground)

Siamese Dream (Smashing Pumpkins)

Yield (Pearl Jam)

RECOMMENDED

Abbatoir Blues (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds)
The B-52's (The B-52's)
The Black Album (Jay-Z)
Chinese Democracy (Guns n' Roses)
Dear Science (TV on the Radio)
f#a#∞ (Godspeed You Black Emperor)
I'm Going Away (The Fiery Furnaces)
In Rainbows (Radiohead)
Katy Lied (Steely Dan)

L.A. Woman (The Doors)

The La's (The La's)
LCD Soundsystem (LCD Soundsystem)
Live-Evil (Miles Davis)
A Live One (Phish)
Live Up! (Giant Panda Guerrilla Dub Squad) - (and here)
Magical Mystery Tour (The Beatles)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Various)

Pain in Full (Eric B. & Rakim)
Quadrophenia (The Who)
Remain in Light (Talking Heads)

Seven Swans (Sufjan Stevens)

Sung Tongs (Animal Collective)

The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (Ben Folds Five)

Vampire Weekend (Vampire Weekend)

Veckatimest (Grizzly Bear)

The Velvet Underground & Nico (The Velvet Underground)***
Walkin' (Miles Davis)

The Wall (Pink Floyd)***
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Wilco)
Zen Arcade (Hüsker Dü)
#1 Record (Big Star)

RECOMMENDED (solid)

A.M. (Wilco)
Abacab (Genesis)
Absolutely Free (Frank Zappa)

The Academy in Peril (John Cale)
Accelerate (R.E.M.)
Ace Frehley (Kiss)
Acid Tongue (Jenny Lewis)

American Slang (The Gaslight Anthem)

B.P. Empire (Infected Mushroom)***
Back in Memphis (Elvis Presley)
Cafe Tacuba (Cafe Tacuba)

Californication (Red Hot Chili Peppers)***
Can't Buy a Thrill (Steely Dan)
D-D-D-Don't Stop the Beat (Junior Senior)
Da Drought 3 (Lil Wayne)
E Luxo So (Labradford)
The Fabulous Sidney Bechet (Sidney Bechet)

The Fame / The Fame Monster (Lady GaGa)
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Spoon)
G'n'R Lies (Guns n' Roses)
The Grey Album (Danger Mouse)
Hail H.I.M. (Burning Spear)
Hail to the Thief (Radiohead)
i (The Magnetic Fields)
I Am a Bird Now (Antony & the Johnsons)
Jacksonville City Nights (Ryan Adams)
Joy (Phish)

Kala (M.I.A.)
Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space (Spiritualized)
Once (Various)
Pacer (The Amps)
Quality Control (Jurassic 5)

Radio City (Big Star)
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (Black Sabbath)
Slip Stitch & Pass (Phish)
Take Ecstasy With Me (!!!)
Tales from Topographic Oceans (Yes)

Talkie Walkie (Air)***

Undertow (Tool)***
Wake of the Flood (The Grateful Dead)
White Crosses (Against Me!)
XO (Elliott Smith)
Yellow Submarine (The Beatles)
Zaireeka (The Flaming Lips)

Zenyattà Mondatta (The Police)

100% Fun (Matthew Sweet)

NOT RECOMMENDED

Absolution (Muse)

Backspacer (Pearl Jam)
Earphoria (Smashing Pumpkins)
Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morissette)
Louden Up Now (!!!)

MACHINA / The Machines of God (Smashing Pumpkins)
Naked Baby Photos (Ben Folds Five)
Radiator (Super Furry Animals)

Room Noises (Eisley)
Sailing the Seas of Cheese (Primus)
Undermind (Phish)
Velocity of Sound (The Apples in Stereo)
1 (Simple Kid)

AR: Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

We appear to be stuck in the upper register lately... DSoTM is an obvious pantheon member and easily one of my favorite albums. PF came to San Antonio on a legendary 1994 weekend; all the cool kids grabbed those Division Bell shirts, but I picked the black and rainbow DSotM cover edition off the rack - 21 years late, but at least I was evincing a modicum of taste. I even pulled the usual dork move and wore the t-shirt the following day to school; this would normally earn me all kinds of that-guy points, except that cool teacher Dee Brady noticed my selection and commented on how great it was that some of the youth today still knew what was what. YEAH (in as far as knowing what is what constitutes being a fan of one of the best-selling albums of all time, I was right there)! So I was in with the 40 year-olds if not with my peers (a path I think well worth taking). Of course I was, because why on earth would you not spend $25 on a chintzy t-shirt that commemorates one of the best albums EVAH? I'll never understand my peers. Or kids these days. Whatever.

I can't remember what initially clued me in to this album - I am sure I had heard of the Wizard of Oz dilly* somewhere, but that was not the driving factor. KZEP played a slew of songs off the album *all the time* - "Money" in particular, but "Us and Them," "Time," "Brain Damage" and even "Great Gig in the Sky" all made regular appearances. I vaguely remember seeing the guitar music for "Money" in a Guitar magazine somewhere along the line, and that may have very well been the final push that got me into the record store to join the multi-millions. I definitely listened to it on headphones on my aforementioned speakerless CD player, and that combined with the fact that my copy was an awkwardly-boxed 20th Anniversary edition (with a large XX and a small iconic prism-light emblem on the cover) clues me in that I must have obtained it in 1993. I may not remember the exact date, but I remember the mall record store where I purchased it at a too expensive but worth it for a legendary album 20 dollars. And I remember the album itself - the anniversary edition (which, incidentally, was too big to fit into any standard-sized CD slot - thanks, Capitol!) included a bunch of slick graphic postcards and a brilliant insert booklet with lyrics. I *pored* over that booklet, I tell you what, any time I was listening to the album in the unofficial mode (i.e., with the lights on). On other occasions, I passed on your typical chemically-induced psychedelic experiences in favor of the easy light orbs available behind my eye-lids. It's a perfect soundtrack for those all-but-the-aural-one sensory deprivation experiences.

* - Just in case you live in Soviet Russia where DSotM and WoO sync you, there is a largely discredited rumor that Dark Side was composed to match up with Wizard. There's all kinds of accompanying mythology - you have to start the music at the third lion's roar to time it right, isn't it weird that "Money" comes on right as it changes to color, the album ends on a heartbeat right as the film zooms in on the Tin Man's chest, etc. It is quite a nifty experience, I'll say - the band entirely denies it, of course, but many scenes, like the one with the wicked witch and Dorothy matched by "black ... and blue" will definitely cause you pause. Check it out if you get a chance; I am sure the internets are rife with links.

It would be easy enough to wax on about the psychedelic majesty of this disc and the utterly serene effect it brings, but that's nowhere near the half of it. Pink Floyd had been experimenting and taking songs into the stratosphere well before 1973, and you could easily argue that Meddle is farther out there in terms of extended space rock. So that uniquely Floydish grandeur and sonic space is not new here. The truly nice thing is the containment - that experimentation has been encapsulated into utterly powerful packages with a variety of styles that flow impossibly into one another. Those packages are split into two sides, each a continuous composition - the first a sort of outline of birth to death, the second a commentary on crass commercialism and various struggles to socially exist / maintain sanity in contemporary society. All songs are, as allmusic describes it, "immaculately produced," and it was no small feat to maintain a cohesive "album sound" given the variety of instrumentation and voices on the disc. It's a downright sheen - sets a benchmark for what I think of as "crystalline sound," and manages to maintain a effortless, leisurely pace despite the tension inherent in the songs. Not to mention the tape loop effects, the incorporation of ambient spoken word, the quadrophonic stereo dynamics that make your head swim in the headphone experience... yeah. And all of this surrounds great songs - cool structures, great lyrics, incendiary soloage, and no dull moments on the disc. None!

So if you take a gander back at my album ratings system, you'll note that Dark Side effectively has it all - great flow / cohesion AND variety, no dips (and a number of high altitude peaks), ridiculous stars stats (four(!) fives, two fours, and three threes), a great opener / closer that starts/ends on the same heartbeat, permitting infinite looping, and a solid dose of mystique taboot. Hell, it even has an iconic cover and a great title (with "moon" referring to lunacy and PF's spaced out tendencies). And it even meets the rock peaked in 1974 requirement (if a little more literally than I meant, and, um, close enough). Call me a populist, as lavishing praise on this album is pretty much an act of playing along with the masses and critics alike, but it just *is* the sort of artistic achievement that makes the majority of albums seem slapped together and uninspired by comparison. So I could end right now, utter the words "desert" and "island" (which are probably losing their effect with this many in a row, oops) and let you know that "Time" is my favorite track. But that would be sacrilege, right? So skip to the bottom if my t-by-t takes bore you.

Dark Side quietly fades into life with a faint, steady heartbeat. "Speak to Me" adds on ambient effects - a watch tick, water drips, an agitated (but very low volume voice) that claims he's "been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks," and a cash register, all of which click in a strange daily life rhythm. A second voice chimes, "I've always been mad," more voices scrum beneath the surface, and a hideous, stereotypical maniacal laugh clicks in, crescendoing as more industrial sounds rattle. A four-time scream explodes in volume to the perfect smooth opening chord of "Breathe," taking us straight from that one minute excursion of psychosis into a wide landscape relief...

"Breathe" is a slow, echoing soundscape, starting the first instrumental section of the album in drenched psychedelia. After the cacophonous opening, the song comes as sweet relief - this is about as laid-back trippy as things get. The lyrics soothe despite their somewhat cynical content: "Breathe, breathe in the air / Don't be afraid to care" before several lines that point out the more limited and Sisyphean aspects of modern life. The song fades perfectly into

"On the Run" - an instrumental fast-paced passage of paranoia and general discomfort. The coolest thing about this tune is the way it was recorded - the main organ line is a riff played on a synthesizer, sped up severely and looped indefinitely. A high hat drum drives the beat, flanged sound effects jump all over the place and airplane / laser-beam fly overs swim around the track as PF abuses the stereo features of the recording. An overhead airport announcement blares airplane departure times, and a voice chimes in somewhere in the middle "Live for today, gone tomorrow, that's me" just before a siren wails overhead. More laughter and a bomb / plane crash to close - a disquieting track to say the least, and its echoing footsteps on marble of the runner "run" right into an army of clicking tocks and the sudden burst of

"Time" - A clock shop's worth of grandfather clock / alarm clock / you-name-it-clocks explode to open this track, and after your nerves slightly recover, the tick-tock-tick-tock electric drumbeat leads to the album's second spaced out area of psychedelic grandeur. The drawn out intro to "Time" is perfect; sparse, despite the myriad things going on - a lead guitar riff, a tinkling organ, a drum solo-ish kind of free-form beat. A song about the limited nature of our existence starts with a jam-out that takes its sweet time. Nice. All of this collides at the 2:30 mark into a down and dirty funked out blast of the awesomes. I lack language for how much I enjoy this track. The opening lyrics are incredible:

"Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day / Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way / Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown / Waiting for someone for something to show you the waaaaay/ Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain / You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today / And then one day you find ten years have got behind you /No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."

The first part is over a slinky sick guitar part, and after "waaaay" it goes over a multi-tracked angelic chorus of oohs. Too good - but after "gun," in kicks a roaring, reverbed, chorused, arena-drenching guitar solo of existential bliss. Seriously, a pantheon effort, all the way through to its wind down which segues to the next verse perfectly. I have to put the second verse down, too, because the lines here are classic:

"So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking / Racing around to come up behind you again / The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older / Shorter of breath and one day closer to death/Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time / Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines / Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way / The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say."

Great stuff, if you're into frank acknowledgments of mortality and all. At the tail end of "Time" we get "Breathe Reprise," a minute more of the initial laid-back space track.

"The Great Gig in the Sky" - a lovely piano ballad with slide guitar accents that famously features a rather insane vocal improv performance from Clare Torry. Though a spoken word lyric assures that, "And I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do; I don't mind," the death wail contained herein certainly captures death's fear along with its sweet relief. This is one of the stupider tracks to write about, as its all about the lilting vocal - check it out. "Great Gig" concludes side one on a somber fade out. Side two, natch opens with the cash register rhythm of

"Money" - I refuse to believe that anyone doesn't know this arch sarcastic take on capitalism, hasn't heard it on the radio a billion times and doesn't know that it's signature riff is in 7/4 time. I'll just throw on that its groove, however many times you've heard it, is sublime. And that this 7/4 song has a best-ever saxophone solo in it ... that gives way to a nasty melt-your-face guitar solo over a 4/4 bridge ... that fades into a more subdued but equally nasty guitar solo ... that fades back up to the face-melter from before! Incredible sequence! The pyro fallout still smolders as the song kicks back into its 7/4 riff gear to close with a final verse. It's amazing that despite the overplay this song has gotten on the FM dial, it still manages to slay me. It ends with some spoken word over the fading riff into the church organ sound of

"Us and Them" is a very, very slow number accented by a saccharine, late night saxophone howl. It features a rather over-the-top chorus with lyrics lamenting war - the whole song is sort of a lament of arbitrary differentiation of opposites. There's an extended instrumental section from about 4:40 to 6:00 (this is the longest track on the disc at 7:41, btw). It's a poignant tune - and again, achieves a magnificent, serene effect. It also has the astounding feature of the last notes segueing into

"Any Colour You'd Like" - a mid tempo instrumental number with layered, swirling, and echoing-in-round synthesizers, syncopated rhythms, a funk bassline ... and a divine breakdown at the 1:20 mark. Two guitars go into a deft interplay that evokes image of the funkiest call and response dance I can imagine. This song is a five-star killer all the way through - its 3:26 was clearly born of a jam session, but wow did they hit it. And they even wind the jam down so that it snuggles against

"Brain Damage" - A simple guitar riff song that reminds me a whole lot of the opening notes of "Wild Honey Pie" and the general pattern of "Dear Prudence" from the White Album, this is the most overt tribute to Syd Barret (the long-departed and gone-insane member of Pink Floyd). The lyrics are generally about conformist notions of (in)sanity and contain the eponymous "And if the band you're in starts singin' different tunes / I'll see you on the dark side of the moon." Great, trippy number, nicely backed by soulful singers; it often gets paired (and rightly so, because of the seamless transition between the two) with

"Eclipse" - Holy mother of album closers. This is a big, bring-down-the-house sum up of all that has gone before, with full band, pentecostal organ riffs, choir-backing. The lyrics, because they make the tune (with a serious run-on sentence and seemingly arbitrary inclusion of the word "And" throughout):

"All that you touch / And all that you see / And all that you taste / All you feel / And all that you love /And all that you hate / All you distrust / All you save /And all that you give / And all that you deal / And all that you buy, / Beg, borrow or steal / And all you create / And all you destroy/ And all that you do / And all that you say / And all that you eat / And everyone you meet / And all that you slight / And everyone you fight / And all that is now / And all that is gone / And all that's to come / And everything under the sun is in tune / But the sun is eclipsed by the moon."

The album ends with a perfect punctuating final chord and the aforementioned thirty-second heartbeat fade. A parting spoken word shot is delivered, too: "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark." Just a great, great work - it's beautiful regardless, but if you have any penchant for psychedelia and the blues rockers / synthesizer experimentation that pepper this album, you'll have the same harmonious response to this one that I do. And if you get too locked in that ear to ear smile and don't pay attention, your album will loop heartbeats to heartbeats and you'll be back in for another Infinite Jest of a ride.

Pretty obvious that DSotM is the disc that will make it into the desert island suitcase even if I get shipped to a second desert island and have to pare down the original group. Part of it is probably due to my biases for certain types of music, my taste for jams, etc.; I'm not going to argue with others who tend to put this in the 50 range of their top 500 album lists. Shimon and I recently talked about PF and their tendency for sleeve-heart emoting. I'd argue that this album hits the perfect balance - grandiose in scope, dead serious, but so well-crafted as to negate accusations of pointless self-indulgence. Maybe that makes me the perpetual teenage would-be stoner who is fascinated by unsophisticated takes on madness and spacey instrumental passages. That's fine. But for me, Dark Side captures capital-I It and is a full realized work of art that is simultaneously exploratory, contained, crafted and certain-mood-evoking; I'd be yes, insane, to ask anything more.

Status: Desert Island Recommended
Nyet's Fave: "Time"

Addendum: Phish covered this album in its entirety before a small crowd in West Valley City, Utah, on 11.02.1998. This was all the more impressive as they had just covered The Velvet Underground's Loaded just two days before in Las Vegas. So I suppose they had two albums ready for Halloween that year. They segued to it straight out of the narrative section of "Harpua" - I don't need to tag a Phish lesson onto this already ridiculously long review, but they typically play a snippet of some song in the middle of "Harpua" as part of the narrative of what "Jimmy" is listening to on the radio or what have you - and it had to have been one of the more shocking / mind-blowing / OMFGWTFTTMHOORAY! moments for the people in the audience when the band kept playing the entire album. They do an exceedingly serviceable job, obviously lacking saxes, backup singers and tape loops and such, notably putting a particularly wacky spin on "Great Gig" by having Jon Fishman sing the thing falsetto and exuberantly. Solid work, everyone and their phishy moms wishes they could have been there, and this concludes the Phish cover albums series! YAY!

Also worth noting is that DSotM has been covered by a ton of bands, both live and in studio. One notable / popular version is Dub Side of the Moon, a reggae take on the disc. More interesting to me is that The Flaming Lips have announced their intention to release an official album cover of the LP. Wha? There's no predicting those guys, I guess - it should be interesting to see what they do with it, as sometimes they remain faithful to covers ("War Pigs," "Bohemian Rhapsody") and other times they go goofy ("Can't Get You Out of My Head," "Seven Nation Army"). We'll see. Alright, I think that's enough. :)

AR: A Live One

Phish - A Live One (1994/5)

Ah, the danger of reviewing Phish albums: I'm a full-fledged fanboy, so you're not going to believe anything I say positive about their albums, and the temptation is to go into even more-boring-than-the-song-by-song-accounts minute-by-minute accounts of the particular jams incorporated here. Fair enough; you don't want to hear it, and I don't particularly want to write it, given that anyone with a similar level of interest is likely already well into the most popular albums like this one anyways. So I'll try to keep things concise and general audience level unlike, say, a thirty minute exploratory "Tweezer." As though that sort of thing would ever find its way onto a major label release! Right? Oh, who am I kidding, this great disc is going to get the full track by track treatment. You should have guessed that.

ALO is a compilation of performances from 1994; it was released in '95 and is a pretty healthy mix of signature tunes, previously unreleased but concert staple tunes, some quite poppy numbers, and one left field oddity. Most importantly, it was their first official live release, giving the uninformed (which very much would have included me in 1995) a taste of what all the noise was about. Phish knew the double LP was en route and had purchased all kinds fo digital, fancy-pants recording equipment in order to tape all of their 1994 performances. A complex process involving band member journals and phish.net voting polls went into selecting the final list such that the end product was a mix of band and fan favorites. That process itself worked wonders, as the lack of a singular mind led to the inclusion of some invigorated live versions, some fan favorites finally put to collectible official wax, and some waaaaay out there experimentation of which the band was so fond.

"Bouncing Around the Room" is a lively take on the lead candidate for Phish's poppiest song* - it had already been released on the studio Lawn Boy and is not an improv vehicle in any sense, so it was sort of a strange lead track choice. In the interest of being representative, though, a solid choice - sort of shows Phish's more reined in side, showcases a single-worthy wispy love/dream song of sorts, and reveals that they can nail those harmonies and intricate guitar loops live, too. The second track, "Stash," had also been previously studio-released on Picture of Nectar, but in nothing like the monstrous form here. It's a minor key calypso jazz jam number with bizarre lyrics and just a sick, sick lead guitar melody. The jam winds spaceward, and if you ever want a quick lesson in "tension and release" musical improv dynamics, ALO's "Stash" is a great place to look. An all-time version of an already great song clocks in at about thirteen minutes, but the whole thing simmers and destroys the studio version.

* - The other candidates would be 2000's "Heavy Things," 1993's "Sparkle" and 1994's "Down With Disease" (which, believe it or not, had a video made), though the latter is so explosive and dynamic in concert that it's not truly in the running. 1994's "Sample in a Jar" is probably another one. "Bouncing," though, in particular, never features improv and has a tendency to induce groans from a noticeable part of the audience. I happen to find it to be pop gem-ish, but that's just me.

"Gumbo" is a goofy sort of previously unreleased New Orleans funk number featuring a tale of a gun-slinging parrot. It's backed on ALO by the Giant Country Horns to fantastic effect. At 5:15, it's another contained poppier number; the vocals are memorable and it's butt-bumping beat makes for great dancing. "Montana" is the oddball here - it's a fairly freeform ambient jam that is actually lifted from a Tweezer improv, but functions nicely as a stand-alone piece. It functions even more nicely as the de facto intro to Phish's signature "You Enjoy Myself," a multi-part fugue-based tune that in concert gets all kinds of space exploratory treatment, bass solos, a segment called "nirvana" and some one-of-a-kind vocal scat jamming. The ALO version is 21 minutes long (!), giving all the sections, composed and otherwise, ample room to breathe (the vocal jam segment alone is some six minutes). It had been previously released in much tighter form on Junta, but the ALO version gives a much better idea of the possibilities of the song. Not to mention hearing those passages nailed live is just breath-taking - this is one of my favorite versions of "YEM," fwiw.

"Chalk Dust Torture" shows up as a repeat of a release from A Picture of Nectar, and thank Hashem it did - the APoN version is sparse and a little routine, whereas this one brings the crazy Led Zep on speed energy the song normally features. All kinds of concert goodness in this straight-forward rocker - a big riff, an anthemic chorus of "Can't I live while I'm young?," and a devastating guitar solo. This song often evokes "Fireworks!" comments, and this version is one of the best at that - indulgent, '70s guitar god rock, good for all of its 6:49. Things slow down a bit for the dramatic (and previously unreleased), reggae-inflected "Slave to the Traffic Light," a soaring, epic piece. It's a fan favorite with limited lyrics, lots of volume dynamics, some emotional keywork from Page and a long outro that the band uses to ramp up to a blissful peak. Great to finally have this in official release form; Phish nails all eleven minutes.

Disc 2 opens with "Wilson," a borderline metal rocker from their Gamehendge narrative. Ba-dum, ba-dum ... "Wilson!" goes the audience-participated opening, and in similar fashion to "CT," Phish proceeds to tear things up. "W" is a fairly simple song (it's one of the few I can play (at least the rhythm guitar part)), and Trey et al. use it to, yes, rock faces off. This is a standard version in that pyrotechnic antics are standard 'round these parts; again, previously unreleased, so great to have etc.

And then there's "Tweezer." A blink of Phish's popular riff-rock, funky-groove improv vehicle is on APoN, but the versions of "Tweezer" fans talk about often get the EPIC tag and while on in free-jazz improv land for half hour chunks. (Beck had the misfortune of witnessing a 45 minute Tweezerful second set on 6.22.95 in Canandaigua, NY, and I don't think she has forgiven the band in any tangible way since). This is one of those Tweezer-beasts, and you have been warned. I *heart* them big time, because if you can find that proper state of attention, the band is doing fascinating stuff with musical interplay, changing tempos, melodies, keys, you name it. It's what phans know as "Type II Jamming" which essentially means getting telepathic and abandoning all standard music rules. Experimental, to say the least, and understandably not everyone's cup of tea. ALO's "Tweezer" comes in at a just a shade under 31 minutes, features all kinds of dissonance, and alternately earns severe praise from admirers and asinine comments from Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly record reviewers (I'll let you google those two yourself). And it has some outright goofery in there, too, lest you take the whole ordeal too seriously. Litmus test - do you have Miles Davis in your record collection? Okay, but do you have Ornette Coleman? Not to say that Phish is on his out-there level, but you should probably be able to tolerate that before cracking open a drink to hang with this track.

The album leaves orbit to return to the circular full band mid-tempo calm down of "Simple." It's a triumphant celebration of life type tune, usually sandwiched in the middle of a Mike's Groove (see here), but here it's syrupy smile induction stands alone. This is its official-release debut, and it's a tight five minutes of relief from the previous track. Another o-fd, "Harry Hood," follows, and it is a whole lot reggae-influenced grandiose goodness, too. It and "Slave" are pretty tightly coupled in my mind, and another of the great selling points of ALO is that both tunes find their release to the world here. "HH" is a multi-part composition that is all about beaming smiles - one of the best showcasers of the wide range of all of the members of Phish's talents, and this is one of the all-time versions. I've said that before, yeah? Well, yeah. Litmus Test II - if this one doesn't fill you with chills and warm glowing warming glows at the same time, you will pretty much never get into this band. It's a fifteen minute ride, with every part in its place.

The double disc closes with "The Squirming Coil," another song that had already been released on Lawn Boy but one that once again gets the live workout. The big attraction is Page's awe-inspiring solo to close - it's about a five minute outro, with the other members slowly dropping out and eventually completely leaving stage as he brings the show to a sublime halt. It's gorgeous. But the rest of the song features song cool driving vocal passages and one of Trey's "serene solos" - a few Phish songs ("Lizards," "Divided Sky" would be other examples) have these slowed down guitar passages that just sing and maximize the effect of his sustain. The live take is certainly warranted, here, as while the studio cut is good, this is yet another special cut.

And that's A Live One - not just a stellar intro to the band and a wide variety of their playing styles / stellar instrumental chops, but one that contains hardcore fan-attracting rarities and some best versions of Phish standards, many released for the first time. And so I run into the problem at the beginning of the review - this is easily the best traditional live album from Phish, and it's possibly the best live album of the 1990s. But I don't trust myself to rate it - I prefer the full show releases, and so I really don't go running for this LP very often. But when I listen to it, it's across the board awesome! Pinnacle stuff! But I know I also just like Phish a whole lot and have killed any critical mind I have toward them. So... hmmmph. I suppose in the absence of full shows, this would definitely be among the Phish albums I take, so I would toss it in the Desert Island suitcase. But that suitcase shouldn't be the type of thing that requires this much of a weighed decision! Ugh! What to do?

I'm perplexed. Clearly the only answer is to give it some kind of dual rating. Wait, I've got it. I will give it the Schroedinger's Cat esteemed place in my DI suitcase. I won't know whether it's really there until I look. This would, of course, require me to actually travel to a desert island, so I'm comfortable just leaving ALO in this evaluative state of quantum flux. Problem solved! Regardless, for all of your non-phan-addled minds and purposes, the take home message is that this is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED and will definitely help you figure out if Phish is the one thing that's been missing from your life. It was for me! This was one of the first official albums of theirs I got after attending that Liz concert on 9.25.99, and there is no doubt that the two hours of smoking music herein changed my brainstate forever. Dig into it, and some late night, instead of watching that Friends rerun for the fifth time, use thirty minutes to check out a "Tweezer," why don'cha?"

Status: Recommended (Desert Schroedinger's)
Nyet's Faves: "Chalkdust Torture" and "Harry Hood"*

* - Sometimes the faves selections are affected by external factors. In this case, "YEM" is already one of my favorites from Junta, and "Stash" is already the favorite from APoN. I'm loath to call a 31 minute formless "Tweezer" jam a favorite no matter how cool it is; that's not really the purpose of favorites. So the choices here are qualified, but they're both still excellent cuts from this album.

AR: Exile on Main Street

The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street (1972)

In the continued interest of reviewing all the Phish-covered Halloween albums, here's the 2009 entry, The Rolling Stones dirty basement blues 1972 classic Exile on Main Street. Mick and Les Boys triumphantly managed to break exactly no new ground here, but somehow threw together a soulful batch of Brit-rock Americana that captures something way bigger than the sum of its tracks. It's gritty, dark and lived-in, and one of (if not the) best examples of the intimacy of a recording popping right through the music. Whether it was the drug-addled craziness that bore the album or who-knows-what, Exile saw a bunch of style-chasing bad boys - this is the same group that aped Sgt. Pepper's with Their Satanic Majesties Request - put down something undeniably real. It's a classic and proof positive that the Stones weren't always sucking in the Seventies.

Exile begins in typical RS fashion, with a classic bombastic Keith Richards riff followed by a rollicking, piano-backed verse of Jagger's barely pronounced drawl. "Rocks Off" has ample energy even before the horns kick in after the second verse, and the trumpet screams add to the flashing lights rock concert-style feel. Full band assault here - by the final choruses, things are in absolute full swing. Killer opener - even has a wacky psychedelic bridge that manages to disrupt but not feel out of place. The energy does not dip for track two, as "Rip this Joint" is (appropriately enough) a short roadhouse blues number featuring more full-speed ahead piano-trilling and a pair of crowd--slaying sax solos. Jagger spits his vocals out the side of his mouth - the music mercifully, for the sake of your record player, fades out before things start spinning off axes. Two more powerful and driving, yet murky and mysterious, opening tracks are hard to come by.

"Shake Your Hips" is an old-style blues riffer which basically sounds like the opening to some ZZ Top song on repeat. It's not 12 bar at all - just the same pattern over and over, with Jagger's eerie vocals and the brass section wildly shifting over the course of three minutes to keep things intriguing. The table is set nice and spooky-like - I'll try to avoid reiterating this throughout this review, but the image of half-drunk dudes rocking out while strewn about couches in some warehouse at 4 in the morning is pervasive. This mood sets the stage excellently for "Casino Boogie," another slow to mid tempo blues shuffle that starts off sparse and crescendoes to a brief jam out with some nifty full band, horns and all, interplay. You can easily see members finishing their individual runs, setting down their instruments and reaching for green-bottled brews.

As great as all of the songs, the closing track of side one of the original double LP, "Tumbling Dice [Gambling?]" is a step above and the obvious first single off the album. "There's fever in the funkouse now," indeed. It's a general tale of rock-starrin' and womanizing (gambling? :)), and the backup singers, another signature Richards riff, and the slowed down groove / drop-out choruses are flat out glorious. It's simultaneous raunch and summertime breezy groove - impressive stuff.

"Sweet Virginia" follows with some acoustic and harmonica stompin' country honk. More visions of basement sing-alongs as everyone in the studio seems to chant along with Jagger over the choruses. There's even a saxophone wail throughout, too - despite lines that you "got wipe that shit right off your shoes," this is a fun times, endearing tune - I, too, thank you for your wine, California. "Torn and Frayed" maintains the laid-back vibe with a banjo / piano / slide guitar combo - the Stones pulled off a lot more of an alt-country vibe than people often remember. That tendency is continued in the protest country blues number, "Sweet Black Angel," a lovely stripped down number challenging the murder charges brought against Angela Davis.

After that relative slow down and trek into political sincerity, the groups brings down the house with the side two, LP one closer, "Loving Cup." Full disclosure - I definitely heard the Phish versions of this first, and those particular cover versions led me to purchase Exile in the first place. As grandiose as those anthemic cover encores are, the original horn-backed and Jagger-sneer-led version is a flat-out lymbic accomplishment. Hard to say why this song, among all the piano and guitar led rockers on the disc, is so great - it really sits in the same genre as the bulk of the album - but that je ne sais quoi makes me reach for the non-existent lighter in my back pocket every time. It also accentuates how well organized Exile is - the sides feature big openers and closers throughout, so it's one of the more actualized double albums in that there are actually seemingly two albums within.

Case in point - side three opens with another riff-number (sorry for the lack of a better description, but there is something very particular about these mid neck Richards riffs that give The Rolling Stones that signature vibe) in "Happy." High energy, very similar in sound to "Rocks Off," replete with "Pround Mary" allusions, and a good move to kick off the latter half. "Happy" was the album's second single, too. It's followed by the straight ahead, non-standout "Turd on the Run," a quick, spastic number with nearly indecipherable lyrics. Nervous energy is going for it, so it still sinks in despite being a relative low point.

Things settle back in with a nasty slide riff blues romp in "Ventilator Blues," perhaps the edgiest song on the disc with snarling "When your spine is cracking" spat lyrics. A real thick, plodding groove gets set for this one, and even in the short 3:24 they manage to get quite a jam going. It fades nicely into the uberspooky "I Just Want to See His Face," a sort of meditative trance number with the ever-quotable "Let this music ... relax your mind" and "Don't wanna walk and talk about Jesus, just want to see His face." The backup singers and lyrical content give this a little bit of the gospel feel that has bubbling beneath throughout the album, a vibe that becomes more overt for the remainder of the album, starting in the next track, "Let it Loose." It's a bit melodramatic, a big anthem song in the tradition of "Wild Horses" or "Can't Always Get What You Want." This reflective tune closes side three.

Almost like clockwork, side four opens with another Richards' riff number in "All Down the Line"- pretty typical Stones fare again, with a catchy melody and a little bit of that edge. The horns really step it up here to make the tune stand out more than it otherwise would. "Stop Breaking Down" has the Stones covering something that sure sounds like Robert Johnson-era blues territory* - they rock its face off in a demonstration of what one can *actually* do with the 12 bar blues format. :)

* Ed. - I'm an idiot. That would be because it is a Robert Johnson song. :)

The gospel inflected "Shine a Light" is exactly the sort of dawn-breaking song one needs at the end of a long rock/blues/country/etc. excursion. It's a sort of confessional from Jagger, complete with organs, piano pounding, and a no doubt gospel choir. It keeps things on the right side of overdone - there's always a danger of self-parody with a big choir-backed number like this, but so much of the album has been steeped in down home, late night lick-laying that it comes off as sincere. Amazingly enough, they don't end with this number - it really sounds like the sort of benediction perfect for such a big album, but the Stones come back with an encore song of sorts in "Soul Survivor." Good call? I'm not sure, particularly since it's a choice to go from a positive, comforting message to the repeated taunt that "you're gonna be the death of me." It's also one of the two or three tracks on here that I don't just love, so I'm probably the wrong person to consult. Regardless, the Stones stay true to form and end their rough-around-the-edges epic with a sneer and in doing so cap off one of the classic authentic blues-rock works in popular music.

As you probably noticed, there's nothing weak on this album and really only one or two songs that don't make the good-to-great-to-transcendent categories. I guess Jagger's vocals could have been better articulated - his slurred drawl is all over the place throughout, though it's pretty perfect for this style - and some of the tunes are better mixed than others. But really, this is a boulder-sized gem of a double album, one that will definitely make the island suitcase. I think a lot of people who may have been into the Stones in the '60s but lost track of them at the start of the '70s are seriously missing out here - while this disc lacks the chart-topping singles of albums past, it's easily my favorite in the Stones catalog, and should be a required addition to all sensible collections. Exile lives up to the hype and maybe forces us to embrace the embarrassing notion that the Brits do Americana right - the master becomes the student becomes the master again. A hearty hat tip to that, and if this disc was indeed the love-child of many a heroin-fueled songwriting session, then I'm all in favor of legalization. For Jagger/Richards.

Status: Desert Island Recommended
Nyet's Faves: "Loving Cup" and "Tumbling Dice [Gambling?]"

p.s. Just a brief note that Phish TORE UP their live cover of this with the backing of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. Tons of highlights, but "Loving Cup" was far away the best version I've heard, and the "Ventilator Blues > Just Want to See His Face" segment was outstanding. Everything was fairly extended from the album version - the RS comes in at 1:07, and the Phish set tipped those same scales at 1:42 (though admittedly with some crowd noise and band intros and such). One of the best things - you can understand what Trey says! Yeah! Anyhoo, it was a fantastic choice / execution for Halloween, and some of the songs are still popping up in fall tour setlists. I heartily approve.