New Phish Album

I discovered Phish around the time that the Grateful Dead were melting down, in the year or two before Jerry Garcia's death, and since then I've become a fan. They've gone through a hiatus or two since then but have bounced back to become the most popular of all the so-called jam bands, and for good reason. Perhaps their apex was 2018's Baker's Dozen, where they played 13 shows at New York's Madison Square Gardens, without repeating a song, and without using setlists. I can't think of another band that could close to doing that.

They released a new album today, Sigma Oasis (Spotify link). It continues their explortion of quirk, progressive, orchestral-tinged pop. A few of the songs have shown up in their live shows; others are new (at least to me). But so far, I like them all.

Jambands.com has an article on the album release:

The band released a statement on how the record came together. “Sigma Oasis came to be during the first week of November 2019, but it wasn’t planned that way at all,” the band wrote. “We were headed up to The Barn to rehearse for our fall tour and ended up discussing this batch of relatively recent songs that we were particularly proud of and always wished we had recorded, but hadn’t had a chance to yet.” 

“Trey suggested calling up Vance Powell as he mixed and engineered Ghosts Of The Forest. Vance was very familiar with the space and the console so we set up the gear with no room dividers, no click tracks. Nothing. Just like a Phish show. Open space,” the statement continued. “We played for a couple days. We just played a bunch of songs — very quickly, a few takes, very organic, natural, live, honest. We had the best time.”

SiriusXM's Phish radio channel will host a special at 10:00 a.m. today, rebroadcast over the weekend, with members of the band breaking down the album track by track.  Note that you can now stream SiriusXM free in Canada (I assume it's also true in the US).