I was charmed right away by the opener, the album’s title track. The thing is, I didn’t always hate Phish.Īfter reading about it on a Smashing Pumpkins message board, I convinced my parents to buy me a copy of Phish’s 2000 studio effort, Farmhouse, when I was 13 years old. Hearing the jam alone, not knowing who played it, I would’ve assumed I was listening to the krautrock band Neu! All of this sails us so far beyond wherever the groove was before that we’re floating in space.

You can hear a synth tone that resembles a choir of bees emitting from some tier of keyboardist Page McConnell’s expansive synth rig, while drummer Jon Fishman reduces his drumming to expressive, atmospheric triplets on his cymbals. Instead, each contributes to a running dialogue shared by the four of them. When Phish inch past the song’s compositional limits into unknown space, Trey Anastasio, the band’s guitarist and primary songwriter, starts playing stuttery disco scratches over Mike Gordon’s bass notes, which sink so far behind the beat it’s like they’re stepping in quicksand. I queued up the first track from it, “Ghost,” figuring it would give me a sense of whether I should dig further.Īfter a few minutes of research, I learned the most acclaimed “Ghost” jam is from a 1997 show in Denver, so singular it is referred to among fans simply as “The Denver Ghost.” This version, which expands the four-minute studio version into a 21-minute odyssey, sounds like it’s falling apart as it’s being played, giving it the draggy energy of a tangle of wires. I started with 1998’s The Story of the Ghost, in part because I’d always found the cover art a little unsettling: a painting by George Condo of a giant gerbil-like apparition dressed in flowing white robes, the cartoon cuteness of the creature’s face growing very sinister whenever I realized its nose was actually a second face, just as cute as the first. (Phish fans are more judgmental than people who love a band like Phish have any right to be.) But as I read Jess’ posts, there was something about the energy of their writing-the effusive love they exhibited for Phish while acknowledging and embracing how many things are outright embarrassing about them-that made me want to see what they saw. Focussing on the group’s studio work was an unusual approach, as most seasoned fans are committed to feeling indifference or outright loathing toward their studio albums-they’ll swear that attending a show in-person is the only proper gateway into the band.

Last year, a few months into the pandemic, I was just starting to retreat into the art that dominated my adolescence-’90s Paul Thomas Anderson movies, anime, Pink Floyd-when I noticed my friend Jess embarking on a similar project, ranking and writing down their impressions of every Phish studio album that came out before their first hiatus in 2000. If I tried to enter their universe, I assumed I would bounce off an invisible wall. Everything I knew about Phish from afar made them look too involved, too obnoxious, too myopic. And their relationship with their fans can register as an annoying in-joke, especially when the band sows its jams with strange signals and secret language only legible to the devoted. The members of the band are aggressively unbeautiful singers, especially when they attempt to harmonize. Arrangements can be perversely convoluted, moving more like Saturday morning cartoons than songs, a warehouse of various Acme explosives going off. Lyrics are nonsensical, silly, and/or corny, with few exceptions. It rejects whatever you think of as tasteful or intelligent or even humorous none of these standards are meaningful within the realm of Phish. Their music is inherently uncool, like the washed-up refuse of classic rock, prog, and whatever you want to call what Zappa did fused into hideous sound sculpture.

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