This latest Phishing trip begins as you’d expect a Tchad Blake-produced record would— in a fog of creepy, bone rattling Waits-ian gothic rambling, pinging metallic hammers and loping, percussive grooves that claw their way through your forehead. What is this fantastically ghoulish noise? Will this, the band’s final record, be remembered as Phish’s Wild Years?
Better cast elsewhere. The promising opener quickly disintegrates, giving way to a tune that sums up everything that’s wrong with much of Phish’s latter-day work; the title track is lazy, nondescript jam funk that should’ve come with a warning: MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS, DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY WHILE LISTENING. Even the hyper-cool distorted Fender Rhodes and Blake’s subtly echoing sonic brushstrokes can’t salvage this song.
But just before the gravelly tug of the highway’s shoulder slides under my spinning tires, I’m jolted awake by a completely unexpected country/pop-rock jewel. Though lyrically deficient, “The Connection” is two minutes and 20 seconds of radio-ready, feel-good bliss. Some might have nightmare flashbacks of the band’s bunk bubble-gum ditty “Heavy Things” from 2000’s Farmhouse, but fear not; this new single actually works. It could be the type of improv-rock crossover hit “Runaround” was for Blues Traveler in the mid ’90s.
John Fishman keeps it rocking hard with his Gatling-Gun drum fills on “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing,” a solid approximation of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter.” This is some of the band’s best jamming on the album, with guitarist/frontman Trey Anastasio summoning up the raw musical fury of earlier Phish tunes like “Wilson,” “Llama” and “Horn.” The low-end sludge-rock interlude “Maggie’s Revenge” hearkens back to the opening track’s hints of a darker album that never emerges, and its fuzzed-out noise experimentation is reminiscent of “Riker’s Mailbox” (from 1994’s Hoist), not in sound, but in brevity and function.
Much of the rest of Undermind, however, is a damn-near perfect metaphor for Phish’s performances in recent years—moments of greatness sandwiched between bouts of mostly uninspired mediocrity. “Nothing” and “Two Versions of Me” are tired hippy rock, “Crowd Control” comes far too close to the aforementioned “Heavy Things,” and the quasi-Sinatra sentimentality of “Secret Smile” will leave you screaming for the quirky multi-part Phish epics of yore. But in the accompanying DVD (a short making-of-the-album film by Danny Clinch), the band explains away this new direction (or lack thereof) as “smallification”: a stripping-down, a departure from complexity in order to discover the essence of the band members’ musical personalities and their newly written songs—being “naked as possible,” as Anastasio says in the documentary.