'Big Boat'

As I suspected, Phish's new album, Big Boat, with Bob Ezrin at the helm again, is an excellent companion album to 2014's Fuego.  Sonically similar and as expertly crafted, the songs on this new record feel instantly familiar (even the ones that have not yet been performed live) yet demand and reward repeated spins.

But this is not Fuego II by any means.  Sure, there is still the shiny sound, bright horns, and layered vocal harmonies, but the band has offered more intimate lyrics and continues to push their musical boundaries - or rather, prove once again that there are no musical boundaries.

Before I start gushing, however, I should note that, as with the predecessor, there are some disappointments.

For instance, Page McConnell's "Things People Do" had a couple of go-rounds this summer as a bluegrass number akin to the old "Long Journey Home".  But on record, it is just Page bumbling through it with some weird sounding instrument.  Also, two new Mike Gordon tunes debuted this summer - the excellent and playful "Let's Go" and the interesting, but darkly challenging "Waking Up Dead" - but the album includes only the latter.

And speaking of glaring omissions - the excellent new long-form "Mercury" made a big splash from its four performances, so much so that a version was included on the latest Live Bait compilation.  Yet that, too, was edged out in favor of a different epic, "Petrichor", which Trey Anastasio originally performed with symphony orchestras before re-arranging it for Big Boat.

Still, the positives far outweigh the negatives. The blue-eyed soul of "Tide Turns" and the breezy tropical pop of "Breath and Burning", with its ukulele and modulations, make wonderful use of the horn section.  The former reminds me of "Loving You Tonight" by Squeeze and the latter is what I imagine Jimmy Buffett would sound like if he wrote better songs.  "Home" is an great new upbeat Page tune and "Running Out of Time" is a pretty little number that starts out with acoustic guitar and gradually brings in the rest of the band to finish it off with a '70s soft-rock vibe. And "Miss You" is a lovely ballad that pulls off the trick of taking a simple, age-old chord progression and using a sweet melody to make it sound new and fresh before it climaxes with a soaring guitar solo (no one can melt your face with a I-IV guitar solo like Trey can).

While Bob Ezrin puts his magic touch on all these songs, he also knows when to let Phish be Phish, like in "Blaze On" and "No Men in No Man's Land".  After a year of playing these songs live, they did not need any tinkering, so what we get are straight-ahead, amazing-sounding performances of the tunes.  Yet Ezrin still manages to sneak in a few sonic delights (listen closely for the rhythmic triangle in "Blaze On").

The band brings out some bigger surprises, though, in the front and back ends of the album.  The lead-off track, "Friends" is a Jon Fishman-penned and -sung tune that sounds like a cross between the Who's Quadrophenia and Velvet Underground's Loaded - which is totally awesome and not as weird as one would think since Phish covered both those albums for Halloween shows in the '90s.

The final third of the album is as entertaining as it is eyebrow-raising, with Page's "I Always Wanted It This Way" laying some eerie vocal processing on top of a downright disco-esque groove.  Though it sounds more like something that might have been among the curios on 2009's Party Time, it acts as a neat left turn here.  And though the closing "Petrichor" is a fantastic and intricate 13-minute composition with orchestral flourishes, staccato accents, and flurries of notes on guitar not heard since 1988's "Divided Sky" (think of it as that song's more orchestrated cousin) - it is "More" that provides the show-stopper.

Starting as a straight-up ballad, "More" builds gradually as Trey pushes the vocal melody to the upper reaches of his range (it will be quite the effort if he can pull it off in concert) and the song eventually bursts into, out of, and back into double time, while the rest of the band sings the chorus behind him.  It is a goosebump-inducing climax that shows off the best of what the band and producer can do together.  So when "Petrichor" finally weaves and winds its way to the end of the album the listener is left with a feeling of both the present and past, a full circle of Phishtory summed up in the album's final 18 minutes.