It's the long weekend Monday and so far, I have accomplished diddly-squat aside from a two hour nap, watching about three quarters of 1917 followed by another three hour nap -- because that's just how I roll today. Truthfully, I'm pretty whipped after a weekend of mining for gems and crystals at the Princess Sodalite Mine in Bancroft, Ontario for Kelly's belated 50th birthday.
Yup, we cracked rocks in the hot sun.
Sure I could have thrown a large object through a storefront window downtown and done the same thing only saving myself a shit ton of money in the process, but after you've heard a large 300lb burly looking biker guy with neck tattoos squeal with glee after cracking open a boulder the size of my head to reveal a sparkly geode of some sort inside, well, I guess I'm saying it wasn't so bad. "Happy wife, happy life", amiright?
Regardless, today I'm doing as little as possible aside from listening to this Cluster Flies record that Uncle Lance grabbed me for my birthday last weekend.
Cluster Flies was released by the website JamBase as a fundraiser for the site during the pandemic. It contains covers of all the tracks from Phish's 2000 album Farmhouse, several songs from a bonus edition, and a few deeper cuts. The various artists on the album push the tracks into divergent musical directions, including folk, blues, bluegrass, country, jazz, world beat and hard rock. The album also includes some extensive jams. The covers highlight Phish's ability to craft timeless songs that work in multiple contexts.
The album opens with a straightforward cover of the acoustic instrumental song The Inlaw Josie Wales (okay, that's a cool title) by William Tyler. Up next is a short, folk-pop take on Farmhouse by Sylvan Esso. The duo drops the guitar fireworks of the original, which shortens the track considerably. Amelia Meath sings it as a quiet folk tune, highlighted by the dreamy call and response of "This is a farmhouse." The album then shifts into Jennifer Hartswick's take on Dirt. The cover plays as if it was meant to be a continuation of Sylvan Esso's Farmhouse at the beginning, but then evolves into more traditional blue rock towards the end.
Some of the artists take the songs in a more experimental route. A group led by White Denim frontman James Petralli transforms Phish's syncopated '90s-style rock track Gotta Jibboo into a slow-grooving rocksteady tune. The Boston-based musical collective known as Club d'Elf, best known for creating a hybrid sound of funk, jazz, world music and electronica, reworks Sand into fusion jazz territory. They blend Middle Eastern rhythms, spoken-word style lyrics along with ambient guitars and keyboards reminiscent of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew sessions.
Sleep is an oddity in the Phish catalog in that it has a mere two-minute running time. It contains neither a verse nor a chorus. It's more like a poem set to music. Singer/songwriter Amy Helm more than doubles the song length and performs it as a slow, emotional, country/Americana tune. She bookends the track by opening and closing with a series of "oohs" giving it the feeling of a more complete work than the original.
Though the album clocks in at nearly two hours, I found it to be a steady, well-paced listen. Even the multiple extended Phish-style jam tracks do not weigh down the album. To put it in monosyllabic Phish song title terms, Cluster Flies is simply a "Joy" and a solid tribute to a band who hasn't stopped writing their story.
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