THROWBACK: Fishmans -- Long Season: Review

Fishmans -- Long Season

[Polydor]

By the early 1995, the world was just about fed up with the idea of the concept album. The ambitious arcs, the long-winded songs, and indulgent guitar solos were tropes overused to the point of exhaustion. Every rock band in pop culture that wanted to scream their sterility from the mountaintops did so with a concept album. The idea had lost every semblance of being cool in the mid-70s and Pink Floyd’s The Wall was just about the last one that made the mark.

The natural antithesis to the genre’s tropes was in punk music, manifested through its throttling song lengths, black-and-white lyricism, and whiplash blast beats. Following punk was all its child genres, all of which weren’t afraid to venture from the cut-and-dry punk sound but wouldn't dare play into the tropes of their 70s arena rock forebears. The early 90s waves of Seattle grunge strayed further from progressive indulgence, and the concept record was nowhere to be seen.

While the Western World’s rockstars were in a rat race to see who was the least like their dads, Eastern rock music wasn’t dealing with such a juvenile culture war. Like their Western counterparts, Asian rockstars experimented with music, but unlike Americans, weren’t so quick to throw away the last twenty years of music.

One hotbed for experimental music in Eastern Asia was Tokyo and its strong music scene in the 90s that was eager to combine sounds from all over the world into pop fusion rock. This microgenre is known as Shibuya-Kei, and the musicians in this scene put musical exploration ahead of everything else.

Tokyo natives Fishmans were on the forefront of musical experimentation in the early 90s, drawing from forward-thinking genres like hip hop and dream pop while also taking notes from psychedelic rock and reggae. At core a trio composed of bassist Yuzuru Kashiwabara, drummer Kin-ichi Motegi, and frontman-guitarist Shinji Sato, Fishmans delivered a particularly larger-than-life sound with just their three members. The band performed a magical blend of psychedelic dub, hip hop grooves, and dream pop guitars that made something truly special.

Fishmans was at the its musical peak in the mid 90s with a string of three albums now know by cult fans as the Setagaya trilogy: 1996’s Kuuchuu Camp, 1997’s Uchu Nippon Setagaya, and sandwiched in between, the subject of this review, 1996’s Long Season. Unlike its two sister albums, Long Season is an album comprised of one 35-minute long song. And unlike its opulent predecessors, Long Season is a masterclass in musical chemistry and post-rock composition.

The album is a winding dream pop journey that travels through sounds of kaleidoscopic sampling, reggae bass grooves, warm ambience, hip hop drums, and dream pop vocals. It’s a deceptively simple record that is genius in its chameleonic tone and frontman Sato’s brilliant work composing it. Despite its long runtime, no part of this song is uninteresting, thanks to Sato’s brilliance in restraint. He always knows the exact moment to add or subtract an instrument to hypnotize the listener into an unexpected but calming adventure.

Some elements hold more weight than others like the album’s signature piano line which holds the whole piece’s melody together. And as each melodic element adds on like the light strings lines, sharp lead guitars, and ground-shaking bass, the melody builds into this enormous dream pop anthem. Sato’s whispered vocals are endearing and come off like a close friend muttering a song at a campfire. And the drums shift in effect, changing speed and percussion to expertly follow and complement the tension of the album.

Despite Long Season’s daunting 35-minute runtime, it’s actually split into 5 sections that flow seamlessly between each other. It starts with a slow build into its colorful A section featuring all its simultaneously moving melodic parts. Then the middle three parts are explorations where it feels like the band is testing how noisy and experimental they can go with the harmonic sections. It reaches this icy part in the middle where a sample of water droplets in a deep pond feeling like the band is playing in a cave. Suddenly Motegi on drums breaks into a pummeling drum solo so explosive, it sounds like he’s trying to break them. And as fast as it comes, it leaves.

The second half opens up with this heartbeat-like sample that makes way for a fizzling guitar part to bring the melody back. A chorus follows with 60s doo-wop scatting to the melody that leads into a warping, textured violin section. And part five, all of the melody comes back into this grand, exciting finale that bookends the album with the same beat it started with.

Long Season is a beautiful progressive pop journey that deceives listeners with how simple it is, actually inviting them into a masterful piece post-rock fusion that is so enjoyable, it’s hard to put into words.

Listen To: “Long Season”