Jerk Music Critic: Phish, Junta

The best summation of Phish's early days is clearly this kinda-sorta-double album, first as a shorter cassette and then as the more common expanded CD issue, largely because it mixes their incredible capacity for artistically complex jams with quality studio production. "Fee," the lead-in track, is kind of a throwaway, but the magic starts in earnest with the stupendously expanded and almost 10 minute instrumental "You Enjoy Myself" with its multipart movements and textured, radiant melodies. In fact, the instrumentals are the dominant feature, at least for the first disc: other than a couple shouted accent lines, the snarky "David Bowie" (UB40) and my favourite "The Divided Sky" make up most of the runtime and well worth it. "Dinner and a Movie" is a fun novelty with its sole repeated line over multiple themes and variations, but of the other vocal tracks (the amusingly nonsensical "Golgi Apparatus" and the uninteresting "Foam") the standout is the surreal and haunting "Esther," a beautifully performed and fully realized story of a girl, a doll and avarice. I wasn't as enamoured of "Fluff's Travels," which comes off as disorganized rather than daring, though its introductory vocal libretto (of sorts) "Fluffhead" is an amusing lead-in; what rescues the second disc is the earworm "Contact" and its whimsical merger of the open road, American car fascination and basic automotive repair. An amazing surfeit of musical plenty, there's pretty much something in this album for every preference, and while it's never afraid to be weird it's never less than good. The CD issue unfortunately adds three live tracks of somewhat questionable quality, including the egregious 25-minute "Union Federal," less a jam session than a root canal, "Sanity," allegedly some sort of Jimmy Buffett pastiche that seemed funnier to the audience than me, and the (at least amusing) shaggy dog nutball closer "Icculus" ("if only our children were old enough to read Icculus"). "Go home," shouts Trey Anastasio(?) at the audience at one point, and that sounds like advice they should have taken. (Content: a single F-bomb in "Icculus.")

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Express Yourself

The Jerk Music Critic is a collection of amateur music reviews I wrote largely non-professionally between the 1990s and today. Some of these reviews are contemporary and some are retrospective, and a few are rather dated, but all are intended to be free-standing and permanent records of my completely worthless musical opinion. They are presented in no particular order and "new" reviews that occur may actually be simply prior ones I've only now transcribed. Older reviews have been edited to hopefully remove inaccuracies later revealed, as well as add brief content advisories (see "Smash the PMRC") and, where reissues exist with different tracks, brief commentaries on these later additions (the actual star review was not altered).

If you're looking for a specific artist, or just interested to see what I really liked (or really didn't), "When I Break Down" indexes reviews by artist and by number of stars awarded (see "Star Chart" for an explanation).

As we move deeper into the Internet music age where the album format might seem hopelessly antiquated, there is still some artistic value in the LP to those artists who still take advantage of it, and some of these recordings can only be properly appreciated in that context. I hope you enjoy these reviews and recommendations, and don't take them too seriously. — Cameron Kaiser

Star Chart

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An instant classic. Substantially advances/d the state of the art, either technologically, stylistically, or (preferentially) both, and is outstanding music besides. Buy it.

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A excellent album. Nearly every song is a gem; nearly every piece is a winner. Falls short of 5 stars for want of that certain special something, but the difference is in impact, not in musical quality. Buy it.

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Solid. Mostly good songs with a few clinkers. Salvageable with a good playlist. Buy it cheap.

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Mixed. Some good songs stand out, but not enough to make it listenable as a whole. Buy the good songs on iTunes.

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Bad. One or two tracks of even decent quality. Buy the good songs cheap on iTunes.

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How did this get released?

Smash the PMRC

I don't advocate for censorship or unnuanced black and white stickers, but I do advocate for parents being able to raise kids in the way they see fit, which might include introducing albums of controversial yet artistic merit at a point in their child's life when they can better appreciate it. The content summaries are intended to be a very general guide, reflective of only my own personal sensibilities and mine alone, and do not substitute in any way for a parent actually sitting down and listening to the album themselves. If you excessively rely on my content advisories, then I'm the one raising your kid, and you really don't want that.