Birds of a Feather 12/17/99

12/17/99 is typical night of 1999 Phish: there are glints of light and color and consciousness in a vast black ocean of unknowing. At times they are playing to you as if from a hospital bed (your sick host recites vapid truths while his mind is nowhere (there are moments of clarity and flight, brilliant gasps, but you can hear that Phish is dying. There's the sustained, spacey, loopy, heavy, slow stuff, which can be vertiginous and exhilarating, a romantic evocation of death, and then there's the modal jamming, which is a performance of death. Trey's solos seem to be issued from his autonomic nervous system (lizard brain guitar), while his musical mind is in a sort of coma (the melody never remembers what happened the measure before (the purpose of a drone is to externalize musical memory

Birds of a Feather is a sort of double-time Doors jam, and Trey gets stuck stuttering in broken staccato phrases; he sounds like Walter Becker soloing over new Steely Dan. You are desperate for a melody, for sustained notes, for rhythms that cross the bar line, and you curse Phish. But then there's this glistening part where Trey is playing more or less the same sort of phrases but everything synchs into a more organic geometry, the flow and counterflow of living things. The basic rhythmic and harmonic frame is the same, but it undergoes a sort of aspect shift; Trey is bending the notes subtly, the guitar becomes a little voice speaking, the music becomes three-dimensional; they figure out the right gravity and distance and spin to get all the planets moving in orbit around the sun (consider the prevalence of the trope of the gears that turn the universe (this moment or place exists only because Trey fought through shit to get there. There's no way for Phish to skip straight to such musical plateaus (except maybe by playing the first 2 seconds of YEM, or during so much of 1998, when they seem to be always floating, and the music starts free and stays free) It's like a little dream before you fall asleep, where the exact contours of the rush are directly influenced by whatever story you were just telling yourself, but the effect is a qualitative break from all narrativity (you are just delivered to friendly light (the band seems to be illuminated through a crack in the universe (this is the meaning of "The Divided Sky," and, I think, a reason they played that song less in later years: it represented something spiritual they couldn't reliably achieve (this is why the 2004 Keyspan Park "Live in Brooklyn" Divided Sky is so disappointing; it's not that it's bad, it's that they don't respect the song; they trot it out as a gratuitous greatest hit, and Trey blows over it selfishly (maybe he is trying to kill it (Trey's incredible independence from Page and Mike is also one of the good aspects of 2004; you get to hear the pure idea of Phish: just Trey and Fishman (the Zappa thing over the Bonham thing (my feelings about the Keyspan Divided Sky may be influenced by the fact that I was listening to it at top volume at the moment I realized my car had lost its brakes and was flying independently down 495 (I did coast to safety

Halley's Comet 12/7/99

This night at the Cumberland County Civic Center, the strawberry goo is thick and black and starry; the jam on Halley's instantly descends into night and sleep; as soon as the composed singing part ends, they sink into the darkest, most unconscious groove of the jam, it strobes out in the concentric outlines of an expanding echoing shape in a PBS animation, the dull orbit of stars around the head of a man sleeping on the sidewalk on Free Street, the froth of some bagged 40 circulated in a bank vestibule on Congress, the upside-down concrete terrace of the Civic Center flying through space, an ark, the concert within sort of literally taking place in another dimension, unimaginable from the concrete hallway surrounding it (tonight we looked through the windows at the empty hallways (counters, kiosks, bathrooms (it has the brute functionality of a traffic island or parking garage. Part of Phish 99's sound is blankness, openness, and emptiness (a sound suited to the modernism of of 70s civic architecture). They explore impersonal spaces, and you sort of find yourself in this dreamy, personality-medicated but intoxicatingly deeply depressed nowhere. The ambient landscapes are darker and spookier, less friendly than 98, less exploratory than 97, less jazzy than 96, less classically perfect than 95, less adventure-sportsy than 94, etc. Phish has quaffed from Lethe and lies sprawling on the shore, dreaming of nothing, and Trey's backwards guitar lights out into the night space of late Hendrix, the color specks in the darkness on the Band of Gypsies gatefold, the gatefolding double-wide of cinematic space vision, the frame of silence and slow-moving destruction, and this Halley's goes deep into the brain damage and forgetting of millennial Phish, rave Phish. The loop siren (the ghost/drip sound) echoes through, by now an old friend in the world of Phish sounds (thank you for saving me again and again!) The jam turns major at the end, stiffly Ionian, like columns of snare drummers, and the chill-out feels rule-based and forced. Trey does this repeating pull-off thing, a sort of idiotic Allman Brothers riff, an obvious accident of memorized finger positions on the fretboard. He is caught in a trap, and it is a relief when he stops playing and the notes slither backwards in watery reverse delay and finally sink into a drone. This music tends toward death. You can hear what they were trying to rescue themselves from by going on hiatus (there is a void at the center of this music (when they start The Squirming Coil, for a second you hear the kind, breezy summer song you knew from some hippie girl's hatchback, but a wave of blackness quickly descends (in 1999 Phish is almost intentionally sinister (though the next night they bring the kindness (is a comet a flying ice-ball?

More Chinese Democracy reviews

6 Sarah Rodman, The Boston Globe
7 Hank Shteamer, Time Out New York

From Chuck Klosterman's review (1):

Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom?

Is this really what Klosterman would be thinking if he saw a unicorn (as I believe he has)? If you suddenly found yourself face to face with a unicorn, if he or she or it stepped out of the woods to meet you, or locked eyes with you from behind a distant waterfall and flew to you, this would almost certainly happen in slow motion, and you would know that the unicorn was a sort of message from the universe, a confession of an unspeakable beauty. I suspect that Klosterman’s choice of the unicorn is not arbitrary, and that when listening to Chinese Democracy he finds himself confronted with beings much like unicorns, with rainbows and all, and that although the codes of his profession require him to hide it behind a pose of philosophical detachment, this music is sort of like the universe singing to him

3 reviews of Chinese Democracy

Hooray!

1 Chuck Klosterman, AV Club
2 Ben Greenman, The New Yorker
3 David Fricke, Rolling Stone

*Update
Let's add Sebastian Bach (of Skid Row) #4

I just read Ian Cohen's Pitchfork review, a collection of clichés possibly plagiarized from Jon Pareles. Did he listen to the album? (His comparisons to REO Speedwagon and Journey seem less musical than verbal or visual, like he was imagining their logos and thinking of what wearing their t-shirt might mean. If you were looking for references based in musical resemblance, I might suggest that Axl sounds, at different points, like Donald Fagen, Don Henley, Robert Wyatt, and Frank Zappa, though it is more to the point to note that Axl's voice is unique in rock music, and that the many voices on Chinese Democracy are clearly his, even through all the digital editing, which his narrative personality somehow manages to master). Can Cohen teach us anything about the music? Jon Pareles, at least, makes the helpful observation that the album concludes with five power ballads in a row (Ben Greenman suggests that the ballads are the key to the album

**Update 2
Like many critics, Simon Reynolds at Salon seems to have written his review of Chinese Democracy without listening to it. He sounds smart when bringing his readers up to speed on "the loudness wars" (=the record company wants their song to be the loudest and crunchiest thing on the radio, so their mastering engineers are forced to compress all the dynamic nuances out of it), yet his claim that Chinese Democracy raises the "signature defects" of compression to "a hideous intensity" appears to be factually false. Bob Ludwig, who mastered the album, writes (#5) that the final mix uses way less compression than the industry typically demands of a contemporary rock release, which makes Reynolds seem like a bit of a phony. Reynolds: "The result [of all the compression and Pro-Tools], audible on 'Chinese Democracy,' is a bionic precision that forgoes any real looseness and swing." No real looseness or swing? "There Was A Time," "Catcher in the Rye," "Riad n' the Bedouins," "Scraped," and "Sorry" are all pretty swinging at points (there are sustained grooves for dancing, driving quarter notes with dreamy implied dotted pulses at the next rhythmic subdivision, swaying circular rhythms at half the speed, you are ecstatically moving forward and the drummer is driving the thing