The Benja-man Is Verbose

Field Of Crows is kind of a record of contradictions, and I'm trying to get my head around my exact thoughts.  Even the title of the post refers to the fact that more than five months elapsed between its mail-order release and its retail release, such that release date could be said to be 2003 or 2004.  The record is a stripped down rock oriented record that sheds the layers of instruments, female backing vocals, and arguable excesses of the Fellini era... to come up with a collection of songs that includes none under five minutes, in a record that's over sixty-five minutes long.  That's a lot of Fish for something not designated as some kind of "double album."  Suddenly, the principal songwriters besides Mr. Dick are guitarist Bruce Watson and Scottish composer/producer Irvin Duguid.  Because... uh, why not?  Although it's good to have Tony Turrell back on board and a co-writer on arguably the two best tracks here (will I conclude that they are?  Well...

When listening to music with which I'm not familiar, knowing that I'm going to have to write about before listening again, it helps to mentally jot down notes of major things.  When there are a lot of songs and a lot of music (and while I'm walking or whatever I may also be getting distracted by other things), only a few notes can be held in a brain at a time.  On this particular occasion, though, I'm actually in front of a screen while sitting and doing my second listen to I Am Easy To Find .  So this is about the closest to a "reaction video" that I'm capable of doing as a blog post.  These are the most prominent thoughts and impressions, only lightly filtered, that pass through my mind. You Had Your Soul With You:  Closer to a rocker than I usually expect from a National opener.  I like the frenetic strings, but that start-stop distortion used throughout the song is pretty distracting. Quiet Light:  Not only does the track sound like it could have b...

Another new lineup and another new homegrown record label for our man Derek.  Here things are more consistent - most songs written by Fish and guitarist John Wesley, with or without keyboardist John Young, and basically the same musicians on every song.  Stevie Vantsis is fully ensconced now as Fish's (almost) permanent bassist.  We're up to two female backup singers, neither of whom we've seen before or will see again.  With the title of the record, Fish is talking in his own language again - not only will he be on "Chocolate Frog Records" (see Raingods With Zippos for no explanation at all for the phrase) for the rest of his career, but he names a project after a term he'd been throwing around for years.  On the Raingods expanded edition he introduces a live "Plague Of Ghosts" with a little anti-suicide speech that ends with an admonition that "there are always Fellini days."  What does that mean, exactly?  Days in which strange and whims...

Two general points that relate to the record before I make a few very preliminary comments about I Am Easy To Find - presumably a different person than the one who was so "Hard To Find" a couple records ago. *   First of all - yes, I know it's an obvious thing to say - art can only be partially divorced from the context in which it was first experienced.  I deliberately came into this record blind, knowing only that it's somehow connected to a short film of the same title and that it has a lot of duets with female vocalists.  [I'm now led to believe that some of the songs started as  Sleep Well era outtakes and were used to track a film, and that the film then inspired more songs.]  Audiences listening to the record in 2019 would have known it was coming, would have known about the film and possibly seen it, and would have known who was performing on which track.  When you put something out into the world, though, it has to stand on its own.  Five...

I decided I did need to do a post about Vên after all, being such an apparently devoted fan and all.  And I had to listen to all of its versions. For the purposes of this post, if I just mention Vê n, I'm referring to the EP released (to a very limited audience) in 2004.  It exists only on YouTube and the like for us digital people, and apparently the physical versions are also very hard to find.  The "other versions" of songs that I'll mention include:  - the "Demo," also via YouTube, is the original 2003 version of Vên .  It featured incarnations of all the same songs that later ended up on the 2004 EP.  At this point in time Eluveitie was a "studio project" rather than a band.  I amuse myself imagining Chrigel playing everything himself in a cramped attic somewhere, although I do believe that there were some session musicians involved. - the Early Years , mentioned in previous posts, is the compilation released in 2012 that includes, among ot...

Raingods occupies an interesting place in the Fish pantheon.  It's a one-time major label release between the indie records, with a short-lived relationship with metal label Roadrunner Records. *    It's even more all over the place than usual with regard to who plays on what - guitarists and guest vocalists drop in and out of the record like mad.  Mickey Simmonds is back, but only on some of the songs!  Steven Wilson is back, but only on some of the songs!  And I have not gotten a clear sense of Raingods 's reputation among the Fishheads.  The ranking lists I saw when first learning about Fish - usually individual bloggers and forum posters and the like -  tended to list this one as amongst his middling period, and it tends to get passed over for big rereleases and retrospectives.  The record was the only pre-2020 Fish record not to have its own Wikipedia page until late 2024, but it has a page now, and whoever wrote it says that Raingods is...