FISH - A Feast Of Consequences (2013)

A Feast Of Consequences sees things seeming on a superficial level unusually stable.  Fish's vocal cords are finally free of tumorous growths, he's settled into irregular record releases and is actually enjoying playing live again, and the supporting cast is basically a stable group who've all been here before.  Stevie remains the bassist, of course, but also here's Robin Boult on guitar, Foss on keyboards, Gavin on drums, Liz Antwi returning on backup vocals, and Calum producing.  Fish is going to be taking his sweet time to eventually release sixty-seven minute records at this point, and who are we to question?

Track One:  "Perfume River"

"There were no sirens... I heard no alarms..."  I feel like Fish openers in later years tend to be slow builders divided into two halves, with the main distinction being between those that eventually get somewhere and those that kind of meander (like "The Field").  Feast's longest individual track certainly fits that template, with some impressively hopeless lyrics paired with a back-and-forth strummed guitar figure that mostly sticks to a few notes.  Even after introducing the central conciet of the so-called "Perfume River" in Vietnam* summing up the tattered emotional state of someone's life... I think, anyway, it's kind of a confusing lyric for me...  PR still isn't in a hurry to drop a big hook or a big bit of dynamics.  Finally, over seven minutes into an eleven minute song, the guitars strum a little faster, which turns out to eventually be the setup to the actual chorus hitting at 8:08, which certainly cooks during the short time that the track seems interested in rocking out.  

On the whole "Perfume River" is an interesting listen that seems a little much to go back to super-often.

One lyric to which I especially relate that I feel like quoting:

I lock the door, I lock the door
I junk the mail, I never open letters
Program numbers that I know I’ll never call
Collect addresses of friends who’ll soon be strangers

Track Two:  "All Loved Up"

I'm sure Fish will tell you that all of the songs mean something to him, they're all deeply personal, etc.  Yeah, yeah, but you can tell the difference between the ones that actually are and those that aren't.  "Perfume River" clearly is very much about Fish, and means a lot to him.  Is there anything about "All Loved Up" that leads one to believe that he fee;s any of it?  There's no empathy for his online clout-chasing character who's in it "to join the world of wall to wall celebrities," but more importantly, nor is there the slightest bit of insight about the internet users of the 2010s in the toothless satire.  I do not buy that even Fish himself cares about the topic at all.  "All Loved Up" is on the record because the record kinda needed a punchy single-riff rock song to come between the sprawling opening track and the slow ballad, and I guess there wasn't anything better on tap.  "Humiliation, I don't really care..." is how one phrase starts, but I care; I'm embarrassed that a favorite artist would release something like this.  Just a dumb song. 

Okay, I've got one good thing to say - you know how "loved" in the title/chorus is an obvious stand-in for "fucked?"  It's kinda fun how the song's narrator tries his hardest to maintain the veneer, and then during the fade-out he finally breaks down and switches over to the "real" lyric. 

Track Three:  "Blind To The Beautiful"

Interesting choice for the single, a mostly-acoustic ballad that does Fish's frustrating thing of refusing to commit to much of a melody in favor of vibes.  He writes a lot of songs that sound like this and I usually think they're fine.  This is fine.  Also continues the trend of the lyrics being about a few different things at once.  B2TB sounds like it could be a song about humanity's mismanagement of the environment told in "we" form until we end up with "deserted farms where seeds refuse to grow" and so on.**   That's most of it.  Yet B2TB is also heavily about other ways in which an individual is jaded to potential beauty (music, etc), in a way that could maybe be metaphorical (yet another failed relationship?), told in "I" form.  Like I said, it's fine.

Track Four:  "A Feast Of Consequences"

The record has a real acoustic feel.  The main riff of the title track starts on a strummed guitar and introduces the power chords (and also the woodwind-esque keyboard flourishes) slowly but surely until one is left with a great pure pop-rock piece.  Befitting getting older, the topic here is not so much a breakup so much as one those relationships in which it's so hard to cut that last cord, take the last step in letting go of someone with whom one is clearly "running out of tomorrows."  AFOC is tightly composed and catchy to the point that there are times I find it irresistible.  Great song, no notes, would (and will) listen again another twenty times.

Track Five:  "High Wood"

So we're doing a five-song, twenty-plus minute song suite in the middle of Feast rather than the beginning or end, because, well, why not?  Collectively I usually see it called the "High Wood Suite." 

Speaking more broadly about the whole thing, I very much like Fish in narrative moment finding stories about other people to tell - really a continuation of the increasingly re-embracing the storyteller role he's inhabited so well in the past (there've been attempts at going third-person with varying success on every Fish record, really, so I don't know if he ever abandoned it or anything, but it's nice to see it in an epic song cycle).  World War I and its mythology seems to have been a big component inspiration for Fish's broadly anti-war mentality (see: "White Feather") and it's not hard to see why.  Dalton Trumbo called WWI "the last of the romantic wars," and humorist Dave Barry calls it "a truly stupid war."   Being an American WWI registers less than something like the Civil War for me, whereas I can imagine that to a European the War To End All Wars would still loom large for how stark the contrast was between the level of destruction and the tone of the nationalism.

Anyway, "High Wood," the batch of tracks, begins with "High Wood," the song.  "High Wood," the song, for me suffers a little for being an intro; less compelling in its own right.  I don't know that introducing an "I" character and looking over the field adds much to the story, and I don't know that a sappy keys-and-strings intro helps much with the build up given that the next track has its own into/build-up.  I do like the sound of the three-note guitar piece and the chant-like "wood will rise!" part, once the track finally gets going, so, reasonably enjoyable listening.

Track Six:  "Crucifix Corner"

We could easily have just started here.  CC employs the old trick of having less a standard chorus and more a set of statements that end with the same phrase, expressing the changing face of what's going on.  The musical backdrop of course takes us through, from hope and determination as the reinforcements gather, to martial tone as the battle relentlessly builds its new pile of graves but our heroes remain determined (I love both the main riff once the guitar comes in and the descending counterpoint), to a down-step in the vocal melody as the battle turns.  When the piano comes back in, it's pure funeral, no further attempts to disguise what's actually happening.  This is what a song that works great on its own while also fitting in as part of a suite sounds like.

Track Seven:  "The Gathering"

And we go back to see where these young men came from.  Because the prequel comes in the middle of the suite, the folky instrumentations and melody are a nice change of pace.  The tune is actually stirring, uplifting even.  Despite fully knowing how this is going to turn out, I kind of believe it.  Because the music is so strong, the song is allowed to lay it on really thick lyrically.  Lines like:

Tell the children that I shall return
Laden with medals and dripping with garlands

may inspire the reaction "dude, we understand what dramatic irony is, you can tone it down" when written out, but they work completely when sung to this tune.  Oh, and clever spin on a phrase at the very end with "we took the kind's shilling and paid for a brave new world."

Track Eight:  "Thistle Alley"

Even without reading the liner notes, I'd have known instantly which of the five "High Wood" component tracks Steve Vantsis co-wrote, haha.  "Thistle Alley" musically could easily have fit on 13th Star with its use of bass-driven rhythm.  The main verse uses downtuned minor chords and Fish's excellent sense of where to place words while sticking to his low baritone register to convey total carnage.  That's even before the song breaks down, in a good way, blurring the line between past and present with the narrative as the unearthing of mass graves and the events that created them melt together into a single moment of hell, replete with zombie metaphors.  For the pièce de résistance, "Thistle Alley" provides the incredible bite of what the guitars and vocals do on the refrain of "heaven above, Thistle Alley below."  Every element of this composition fits together.  Masterpiece?  I'm leaning towards going there.

Track Nine:  "The Leaving"

Narratively, I get why "The Leaving" is here.  A key part of the tragedy of this sort of WWI story is the futility.  Even if you take as writ that taking control of these few miles of barren land is actually really really super important, you still have to face the fact that all the courage and all the deaths and maimings didn't actually accomplish anything.  So, I get that part.  As a song, though... well, anything after the incredible "Thistle Alley" would be a let down.  This seems a little rote.  We need an "after the war" song, we need to do the thing of having motifs from the earlier tracks resurfacing... generally, something I would never listen to on its own if it weren't part of a collection of songs is something I don't feel much need to listen to at all.

Track Ten:  "The Other Side Of Me"

I'm not totally sure what's going on here.  Another ballad; the main riff is basically an open chord going back and forth between two notes.  The lyrics seem especially opaque - what is "the other side of me on the other side of you?"  One of my occasionally referenced parasocial "friends" at BYAMPOD said that it seems to be Fish writing a love song to himself... and that's closer than anything I can come up.  Maybe less about self-love and more about the joy of getting one's self properly centered after period of being lost?  Anyway, the track is pleasant and doesn't really get boring despite its length relative to content. 

Track Eleven:  "The Great Unraveling"

Still more strummed guitars in yet another song that shows its acoustic core before going electric.  Fish says that this was a tribute to his parents and more generally where he came from.  From a purely wordplay standpoint, it's one of his cleverest lyrics in quite some time, working in all kinds of literal and figurative threads and strands and helix-shaped things that unify a set of phrases about heritage, birth, and death.  Interesting choice to let Liz take lead on a few chunks, including the second chorus, in a fairly personal song, but I think it works.

Final thoughts:

My final thoughts about these last few have been similar.  I've liked some songs better than others, I've thought that multiple songs were a little too long.  The good parts have been really, really good.  For my money, rather than the vicissitudes of the early solo career efforts, since Field Of Crows (yes, it remains a minority opinion to lump Field in with what came after it, etc. etc.) Fish has just been doing Fish things, record after record, at a high level.  As usual for this era, I don't love everything about Feast, whereas I really really like the parts that I like.  

I'd say even within this remarkably consistent period Feast is a little bit of a cut above other twenty-first century Fish records.  A few more songs where the whole thing is a classic, rather than a good song that has a few specific classic parts.  A slightly higher number of hooks, both in the great songs and the okay ones, that are incredibly catchy.  Actual success in putting together a big piece of music with the "High Wood" suite whose different parts synergize.  Otherwise, A Feast Of Consequences represents more of the same, and I mean that in a very positive way: a singer-songwriter with a style that doesn't sound like anyone else out there, producing great music.  Keep 'em coming!  

(Or, uh, continue slowing the pace of output, accumulate your ideas for one last big record, and then retire to run a croft.  You do you...)

Favorite track:  "Thistle Alley"

Runner up:  "A Feast Of Consequences"

Least favorite track:  "All Loved Up"

Rating:  4/5

 

Definitive running list of records by Fish/Marillion that I have profiled so far, in order of what I have decided is unambiguously their quality 

1)  Clutching At Straws

2)  Misplaced Childhood

3)  Raingods With Zippos

4)  Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors

5)  Internal Exile 

6)  A Feast Of Consequences

7)  Fugazi

8)  Field Of Crows

9)  13th Star

10)  Market Square Heroes (single)

11)  Sunsets On Empire

12)  Script For A Jester’s Tear

13)  Fellini Days

14)  Suits

15)  Songs From The Mirror

We continue with Weltschmerz whenever I get around to it!

*Inspired by a trip there

 

**Fish is behind his former bandmates on that particular curve.  I've been waiting for someone to properly explain to our children's children why we grew so tall and reached so high...