Three Fish (1996)

Artist: Three Fish
Release Year: 1996

Rating: 8/10

Track Listing: 1) Solitude; 2) Song for a Dead Girl; 3) Silence at the Bottom; 4) The Intelligent Fish; 5) Zagreb; 6) All Messed Up; 7) Here in the Darkness; 8) If Miles Were Alive; 9) The Half Intelligent Fish; 10) Strangers in My Head; 11) A Lovely Meander; 12) Elusive Ones; 13) Build; 14) Stupid Fish; 15) Can I Come Along; 16) The Easy Way; 17) Secret Place; 18) Laced.

NOTE: The track listing above is for the LP version of the album, which uses a different track order and includes three songs that do not appear on the CD version.

Three Fish was the semi-supergroup formed by Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, Robbi Robb of Tribe After Tribe, and Richard Stuverud of the Fastbacks.  I'll expand more on them if and when I create the artist page, but I felt the need to mention that here.  Anyway...

Forget all the death metal and all the other edgy things I've heard-- this is one of the bleakest and darkest albums I know of.  This whole hour (or 68 minutes, if you have the full LP version) is a constant soundtrack to falling deeper and deeper into a dark underwater cavern, choking and freezing, with no hope of escape, yet thrashing against the inevitable because there's nothing else your body knows how to do.  Somewhere in there, your mind starts to dream...and finds only nightmares.  No, there are no monsters visible, but there's always a great sense of danger around the corner.  From the thrumming, Eastern drones and tribal-sounding drums, to the reedy acoustic guitar, the lurching rhythms, the watery chords and sludgy distorted riffs, the moaning chants and the schizophrenic double-tracked backing vocals, there's always a perfect slot for the yearning and desperate vocals from Robbi Robb, which oscillate between sneering narrative asides, to uncomfortable seduction, to primal shouts into an indifferent void...and the repetition of so many lines goes well beyond monotony and into madness. 

Oh, and of course, the album is interspersed with segments of an old Chinese parable about using logical forethought to avert disaster.  I don't know what more we're supposed to learn from having the story on this album, but at least it fits the vibe very well.

I'm not going to spend time on the individual tracks, partially because they're all pretty similar in substance, despite the differences in form; but mostly because the album works so well as a cohesive unit that dividing it up would defeat the purpose.  I can't see myself listening to any of these songs outside the context of this horrid beast of an album…except, maybe, for the closing "Laced".  That song isn't much less dark and dreary than the others, but that longing "if she should fall away...into the waa-aaa-teerrr" provides as nice a resolution as could be believable after a pulverizing album like this, like an ocean sunrise that may or may not be real.

This whole album is a claustrophobic trip through jagged and troubled inner spaces that few would even acknowledge.  And note that I mean this not just in a lyrical sense, but in reference to the overall vibe and imagery suggested by all aspects of the sound described above.  Sure, the thing is longer than it needs to be, and there's perhaps a bit too much monotony for some, but I don't have a problem as long as the lurching-yet-ethereal trance continues.  Far as I can tell, there's nothing like this out there.  Death, decay, desolation, insanity, loneliness, bitterness, folly, and shame…and beauty.  

Please listen to this.  At least once.