Phish
Lawn Boy

Few bands manage to divide like Phish. Some idolize them, and some hate them, considering them incapable of writing memorable melodies or of making good studio albums.
For their part, critics have beautifully ignored them for years, often giving somewhat controversial judgments, raising on shields a boring and lackluster album like Billy Breathes, meanwhile neglecting the fundamental early episodes of their discography. And while they remain, all in all, a cult phenomenon for us, they perform oceanic concerts in the States, turned into real events by their astonishing improvisation ability, which, along with Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers, makes them the greatest jam band in rock music history, a band capable of stretching the same piece live for hours, with always new ideas, going wild dressing up as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Allman Brothers, and Dixie Dregs.
Like the Dead, they have a hardcore fan base (actually "phans"), the Phish-heads, an absolutely unclassifiable and transversal audience that follows them adoringly everywhere and seems to have a great time: more than concerts, Phish's are real parties, in an almost surreal atmosphere for the exaggerated joy that is breathed, among balloons thrown on the audience that will decide where the improvisation will lead depending on the bounce, trampolines and prankish ideas of all kinds.

Framing Phish's sound in a precise genre is a formidable task, but perhaps alongside Ozric Tentacles and Dream Theater they are, for better or worse among the leading renewers of the progressive genre in the '90s. Certainly, the differences between the three bands are enormous, perhaps only comparable for virtuosity: far less muscular and self-referential than Dream Theater, and less psychedelic and electronic than Ozric, Phish is probably the best of the trio, boasting on their part a frightening encyclopedism and a rich harmonic vocabulary that finds worthy rivals only in Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, John Zorn, and very few others (and as with these artists, a single album does not give an exhaustive idea of their possibilities), albeit with a less anarchic attitude, indeed with a cleanliness of sound and refinement in arrangements worthy of Joni Mitchell.
Their spirit is naïve and innocent, far from intellectual temptations, and summarizes the contradictions of a genre born to be "The intellectual genre" par excellence, but which apart from a few enlightened cases has become, on the contrary, the showcase for sterile onanisms, ultimately embodying total disengagement, among dragons, medieval sagas, and increasingly heavy, convoluted, and kitsch arrangements. Phish's music certainly does not hide particular cultural superstructures or messages, it does limit itself to entertaining, but unlike the vast majority of prog groups, it does so with irony, infinite taste, and lightness.
After Junta, a first self-production, which already contains pearls like "Fee", "You Enjoy Myself", and "David Bowie", the four former university colleagues reach their first official chapter, this Lawn Boy, which has on its cover the vacuum cleaner that in concert is played by drummer Jon Fishman, often and willingly dressed as a woman.
The music of the album is hard to describe: delicate and colorful, a swirling kaleidoscope of genres that succeed and overlap continuously, moving with nonchalance from jazz to bluegrass ("My Sweet One"), from boogie to bossa nova to blues seamlessly, as in the splendid "Split Open and Melt", worthy of the baroque fantasies of Zappa and Ponty, where it goes from fusion to funk passing through a crazy celestial choir, or in the equally Zappa-like but less successful "Bathtub Gin".

Trey Anastasio on the guitar demonstrates an unmatched eclecticism (a cross between Duane Allman, Marc Ribot, Pat Metheny, and John McLaughlin), and Page O'Connell is a keyboardist of superb taste, but what amazes most is the cohesion of the group, allowing Phish to conduct even an atonal fugue with surprising grace as in "Reba", the best track of the album, which after a beautiful fusion guitar interlude closes unexpectedly with a march.
Compared to live performances and also to the subsequent Picture of Nectar (the other great studio album of the quartet), the sound is much less masculine, but in this way, pieces like the initial "Squirming Coil" emerge on tiptoe, balancing between jazz and pop, or the enchanted and melancholic melody of "Bouncing Around The Room", an almost minimalist fantasy that closes the album with a smile.

This real rainbow of sounds is a breath of fresh air, nine tracks to set up a very fun and inconclusive laboratory of a thousand musics, and a precious tribute to fans of progressive suites and jams.
A CD that represents Pop in its most beautiful and noble expression: a must-have.