Released: 1988
Tracks: Fee; You Enjoy Myself; Esther; Golgi Apparatus; Foam; Dinner and a Movie; The Divided Sky; David Bowie; Fluffhead; Fluff’s Travels; Contact; Union Federal; Sanity; Icculus
Best tracks: You Enjoy Myself, Esther, Divided Sky (I can’t choose between them)
Track to skip: yup, it’s Union Federal
It’s too bad they couldn’t fit the whole album on 1 CD, because the extra tracks on disc 2 (Union Federal, Sanity, Icculus) really drag it down. Yes, I’ll admit both Sanity and Icculus are pretty amusing, but I don’t think they’re essential to the album as a whole. And Union Federal is just bad. Believe me, I understand that it’s an improv and a lot of people love it, but it’s really not that exciting and doesn’t do much. And it starts off with drummer Jon Fishman attempting to play a trombone; that is horribly painful to listen to. It’s not even funny. But anyway…
This is some band’s debut album? Holy Turbo Cow! What an incredible piece of plastic and collection of sound waves. More people need to forget all that ignorant music critic talk they’ve heard about Phish, or forget all those smelly hippies that follow the band around, and just listen to the band. Hey, start here, it’s great.
The songwriting and playing of these young guys is really impressive. Just You Enjoy Myself alone is worth it, but the rest is sooooo good. There are a lot of long songs on here, but they’re very engaging and intricate and the time just flies by and next thing you know you just listened to 2 discs of Phish. Phish is a great band and I’ll even say that they’re the best band of the 90′s. Absolutely. You can start here or start with any of the other ones, but make sure to get this one pretty quickly; excellent and essential stuff.
Rating: 94
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