Phish - Joy

Phish
Joy (2009)
JEMP Records

Phish’s new studio album, Joy, shares many similarities with their previous album before this one, Undermind. I had written in my Forgotten Records column on the Undermind album back in May that the album was quite peculiar because its release was completely overshadowed by Phish’s farewell tour in the summer of 2004. At the time, Undermind marked the first instance I noticed where a new studio album by a band was not only considered an afterthought, but an outright nuisance. No one wanted to hear those songs played on Phish’s final tour because there was only so much time with the band left (and the songs weren’t very good, either). So Undermind was quickly forgotten about until I dragged it out of mothballs a few months ago.

But in Joy we have an album that follows the exact same trajectory as Undermind. Released in conjunction with Phish’s comeback tour of summer 2009, Joy marks another slate of songs that no one wanted to hear live and that no one, including hardcore Phish fans, cares much about. With the release of Joy, Phish albums have officially become companion pieces to the tours, and not, as is customary, the other way around. I guess that’s not automatically a bad thing, if the music is good enough to stand out, but it’s generally not good for an album’s sales and legacy for it to be forgotten about as quickly as it arrives. Additionally, Joy is a boring and awful name for an album.

But what of the music? Things start out pretty well, actually. “Backwards Down the Number Line” is a nice little galloping pop song that mixes a solid chorus with a well-done jam piece towards its conclusion. If Phish actually cared about selling this record, they would have opened with this every night, because it works as a heralding of the return of the band and would have gotten crowds excited about one of their new songs right off the bat.

Unfortunately, “Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan” brings about an extended malaise from which the album does not recover. What follows are a multitude of saccharine, blasé pop songs with bad lyrics and none of Phish’s childish but endearing charm. The lyrics on “Joy” are especially painful (“when we were young we thought life was a game / but then somebody leaves you and you’re never the same”); like something I would have excitedly scribbled in a notebook when I was fifteen. Trey’s lyrics were fine when he was singing about “the foggy cavern’s musty grime” or being “stranded for a moment on the ocean of Osiris”, even though they were nonsense, because they were imaginative, they worked, and because they were lyrics all his own. Joy is filled with forced lines, painfully obvious references and tired metaphors.

Additionally, if Phish wanted to make a pop record, they would have been better off just going for it and dropping all pretense of jamming. I realize that’s their MO, but they can always add the jams in later live. On “Backwards Down the Number Line”, the jam works at the end because the song is good and because they successfully built up to it; the jam served as a payoff. But in “Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan”, the song isn’t very good, and the jam at the end feels undeserved, almost like a cop out.

Joy moves through a series of tracks that are more inspired than what’s on Undermind, but truthfully not much better. “Sugar Shack” is a reggae-infused Mike-sung track (yikes) whose ultra-bright verses sound like an amalgamation of Phish and any number of pop divas currently blighting the musical landscape. “Ocelot” was a fun song live that doesn’t do a whole lot on the record, but at least it’s not actively bad. “Light” has an awesome intro that I wish they would have stuck with instead of delving back into more of the same crap we’ve been hearing for 35 minutes. Joy is just so neutered; nothing stands out.

Until “Time Turns Elastic”. The thirteen minute album centerpiece is not the greatest song either, but it at least breaks the spell of bad songs and does some interesting and often pleasant sounding things. Even though it’s thirteen minutes, it never loses steam, unlike some of the streamlined pop songs on the first half of the record. This is definitely Joy’s best song.

Joy is simply bad. If Phish continues to write songs like this, they’re honestly better off becoming a nostalgia act and forgoing new studio albums. I can only recommend the album’s first track and “Time Turns Elastic”, and even those are mild recommendations. See them live; avoid this.

D+

John Lacey