Epic Phail

Phish's Rift and Joy

by M.J. Fine

Pop quiz: Did it thrill or repulse you when you realized that Phish's recent single "Time Turns Elastic," off Joy, clocks in at 13.5 minutes? That's a trick question; if you're a Phish completist, you were already familiar with the half-hour orchestral version that Trey Anastasio released under his own name earlier this year. And if you're not, you don't have to worry about hearing Phish on the radio.

After a five-year breather, the phan-phriendly jam band has returned for studio album No. 14 — that's No. 48 if you count live discs — inspired by no-doubt deep insights into how time flies when you're having fun and paying for it. The sentiments are as bland as dry spaghetti, but the sound is all greasy noodling. "Got a blank space where my mind should be/ Got a Clif Bar and some cold green tea," Anastasio sings on "Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan." That's apparently not a recipe for clearer thinking, but rather fuel for the four repetitive guitar solos he packs into less than five minutes. On "Backwards Down the Number Line," he extols the virtues of remembering a friend's birthday; on "Twenty Years Later," he ticks off a litany of bad decisions. But at least Anastasio's numbers are more tolerable than bassist Mike Gordon's weedy "Sugar Shack."

Time hasn't been kind to Rift, a loose-limbed cycle of tunes about love and dread. In the moribund "Fast Enough for You," the narrator puts off a woman who wants more; by "Sparkle," he's falling into marriage because all his friends are doing it, but the forced jolliness isn't fooling anyone. Collaborator Tom Marshall isn't the most lucid lyricist, but even chemically altered listeners shouldn't have to stretch to understand a couplet like "My friend, my friend, he's got a knife/ My friend, my friend, he's got a wife." Gordon's stanky "Weigh" is even direr, whether he's warbling about decapitation or counting buds. Only the two-part "Lengthwise," written by drummer Jon Fishman, pulses with real emotion, and it gets the job done in 123 seconds, with only 15 waterlogged words and minimal instrumentation. Maybe Phish should spend five years ruminating on that.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)