LONG SEASON

I don't often review and with good reason. Not only are my communication skills not where I would like them to be, but I like to experience music, not dissect it. Putting on "paper" what I feel, how the music deeply can touch me ends up feeling like I am trivializing the experience, just skimming the surface of what can be great emotional depths. It can feel like such a superficial exercise and in the end I wonder, is this review more about me or the music? I want the main focus to be about my personal, unique experience with the music as we all experience and hear music rather differently. It is a subjective relationship between the music and the listener. Here is my extemporaneous commentary.

Fishmans is an act that was active in Japan in the 90s. Sadly, the leading man of the band, Shinji Satoh, died in 1999, which put an end to the act, mostly... The band dabbled in reggae, pop, dub, dream pop, spacey music, Neo-psych, ambient music, Shibuya-kei, funk, blues, experimental music, and post-rock sounds during its career.

Long Season, which is Fishmans' penultimate album, is commonly considered to be its greatest work, both for the studio version and live versions of it. It is split up into parts on albums, but really is one long piece with different sections. The first section is quite psychedelic with a theme that I immediately loved, then it gets very ambient, and then it goes back to the theme and builds a wonderful crescendo.

Some would find this album too repetitive, but music often resonates more deeply with me when themes are repeated with variations and built on. Repetition can bring a sense of euphoria to me or great annoyance. This fits the former. The repetition of this album helps with making it more hypnotic, transcendent, reverberatory, and it builds up the crescendo. I love crescendos. It also is a lush album and subtle. And many no doubt would dislike the extended ambient/experimentalish section and think this 35 minute piece would be better at half the length. I like the state that puts me in and it makes me enjoy all the more what comes later. Another issue some would have with this is the production and vocals, but to me they work. I find Long Season to be a very unique album even if I get some of the same feel from some Sufjan Stevens (say with "Impossible Soul"), and Boris' Flood to some extent.

While this was the first Fishmans album I heard and fell for, I later discovered the live version of Fishmans for their final concert (Satoh died three months later) titled 98.12.28 Otokotachi no wakare. That live is a version that I could and have listened to over and over again, and I have played that a lot over the past months. It is longer than this version, but flies by. It is more energetic, more lively, more exciting, the crescendo is much bigger. It is much better suited to a live performance. I reviewed and gave the album that it is off a five with "Long Season" being the highlight song off it. When I put this studio album on again, it did not enthrall me as much. It is more delicate, more subtly ambient, more subtle generally, smaller, more fragile, can be cold but also warm, sparse yet lush.

I thought to give this a four in comparison to the other, but having not played the studio version in quite some time while being besotted by that live performance, I knew I should spin this again. And then I wanted to spin it again. I spun the studio version three times in a row, and each time I experienced the music deeper and appreciated this version for what it is, for the beauty it contains, and how this uniquely moves me. The lives are not better, I believe, they're different. Each "Long Season" version I have heard has its own mystique and qualities to appreciate.

Numbers don't mean much when it comes to art, unless perhaps, say, you are a mathematician with the soul of a poet, but while I first thought I would give it a four, I am comfortable with a five (we don't have fractions) because I think that this is a truly remarkable release... beautiful and spiritual for me. This does not mean that I think that most Prog fans would rate it as highly, but I consider it to be a masterwork of its own idiom/ilk and of sufficient originality at the time of release to warrant such a high rating.

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