Phish's endure album, the bifold CD A Live One, distilled a decade's account of committed alley plan by a accumulation that has reinvented improvised bedrock for a new generation. If Phish accept an identity, it is one characterized by amaranthine change and agreeable risk, a yesterday-today-and-tomorrow complete that draws abundantly from bedrock history and applesauce innovation. Combine that with a rich, alternate belief bounden the bandage and its admirers into the coziest symbiosis back you apperceive who, and you've got a cultural force to be reckoned with. An all-embracing - and about backbreaking - alliance of Phish's deeply anguish tunes and absorbing jams, A Live One, which went gold, assuredly gave the bedrock boilerplate a adventitious to see what all the fuss was about.
Then, on their seventh record, they rested: Phish yield a well-deserved breather, so to speak, on Billy Breathes, address abundant of the adult cheat that has been their agreeable trademark. Billy Breathes, the group's aboriginal flat absolution in two years, is a quiet gem of an album, and it confirms that guitarist Trey Anastasio, bagman Jon Fishman, bassist Mike Gordon and keyboard amateur Page McConnell are abundant added than a jam bandage from Burlington, Vt., with a abscess fan base. As rustic as the New England countryside, Billy Breathes is a balmy acknowledgment of optimism packaged in concise, radio-attractive songs.
Phish's flat plan has consistently been iffy. While the band's self-produced 1988 debut, Junta (re-released by Elektra in 1992 with added material), still buzzes with novelty, 1993's Rift is just shy of getting a abundant abstraction album. Lawn Boy (1990), A Picture of Nectar (1992) and Hoist (1994), listenable albums with ablaze moments aplenty, assume added like asperous sketches that get a lot juicier onstage. Downright amoebic in comparison, Billy Breathes - co-produced by the bandage and Steve Lilly-white - flows like a beck dream.
The anthology begins with "Free" (first line: "I'm amphibian in the airship a lot") and ends with "Prince Caspian" (first line: "Oh! To be Prince Caspian/Afloat aloft the waves") - songs that bless the dainty beatitude of the group's active allure. "Character Zero" and "Swept Away" alpha out accessible afore aberration off into something wilder and added electric; "Waste," "Talk" and "Train Song" accept all popped up during the acoustic mini-sets that Phish afresh began amalgam into their shows.
If A Live One was Phish's aberration on the Grateful Dead's Live/Dead, Billy Breathes is allotment Workingman's Dead and allotment Abbey Road, focused on agreeable essences generally blocked by rock-concert spectacle. The songs - accounting mostly by Anastasio with his longtime lyricist, Tom Marshall (whose ability has accomplished big time back his "rhinothropic microgaze" period) - unspool above-board images of arete set adjoin the attempt to balk the pitfalls of accustomed miscommunication. "Talk," one of several song titles absorption the album's affected simplicity, could be directed at either a lover or an advancing crowd: "Nothing's anytime assimilation through the clarify that surrounds your thoughts," sings Anastasio sweetly.
Birth is the accountable of the apart apartment of tunes that aggregate a lot of of the disc's additional bisected - no surprise, back the album's appellation is a nod to Anastasio's babyish daughter. With its intrauterine adumbration and dank-underwater jam, "Theme From the Bottom" could accredit to society's rejects or a citizen of the womb. The blue-grass-flavored "Train Song" is absorbed with the surreal Americana of O. Winston Link's photographs of the endure beef engines; in the lyrics, cartage achievement "to analysis the coulds afore we were born/And to allure a new bold of can'ts."
The apartment able begins with Anastasio's mantralike acoustic-guitar solo, "Bliss" (written originally for an afflicted fan), which segues into "Billy Breathes," an aerial abate with the burden "Softly sing candied songs." Anastasio's abiding acknowledgment opens assimilate a shimmering, Enoesque soundscape. "Swept Away," an address for acquittal from a acute mob (of fans?), glides into "Steep," a consciousness-expanding active account of a 19th-century factory. This fades into the admiring chords of "Prince Caspian," in which Anastasio longs for an acerbity adumbrated by a aberrant admiration to accept "stumps instead of feet."
While a folky vibe prevails in the back-porch guitar acrimonious and the band's attractive articulate harmonies, abridged suggestions of Phish's appearance of surging date jams are heard intermittently. The arrange accommodate secrets - whispering boom brushes, the alliance alarm of a theremin - that I didn't bolt at first; they answer a advanced host of influences, some accessible (the Beatles, Traffic, Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd), others beneath so. McConnell's "Cars Trucks Buses" recalls the blue complete of the Meters and the applesauce organist Jimmy Smith, while some of the album's short, burst song hooks about alarm Pavement to mind.
Full of attenuate detail and back-number heart, Billy Breathes changes moods like a blurred bounce day. It contains one too abounding ballads: "Waste," with its address to "Come decay your time with me," is just too precious. But like the bandage itself, Billy Breathes is a active thing, low in irony and top in deceptively above ambition. Consider it a animation of beginning air from the country's better band act.
From The Archives Issue 92: September 30, 1971
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