 |
Fish - lead vocals.
Bruce Watson - guitars and e-bow.
Frank Usher - guitars, slide guitar.
Steve Vantsis - bass.
Mark Brzezicki - drums and percussion.
Tony Turrell - keyboards.
Dave Haswell - percussion.
Danny Gillan - backing vocals on 1,2,3,4,6,11.
Richard Sidwell - trumpet and flugel horn on 1,4,6,8,10.
Steve Hamilton - saxophone on 1,4,6,8,10.
Yatta, Lars K. Lande - "crowd" vocal on 1.
Irvin Duguid - clavinet on 6. |
|
Times change. It was only a few years
ago when people would look forward to the release of a new Fish
album. But nowadays, this release seems just like one of many
others. And it’s not because of the fans or the music lovers, but
because of the artist and the record company. Over kill is a shame
and if there’s one artist that can say something has gone wrong, its
Fish. It’s all the reissues, the re-recordings and the less than
worthy material that has caused the people to lose interest in the
new material. The artist has to prove himself again before getting
credit from the fans or from the music lovers in general. But the
time for getting that credit again is over for Fish. Now was the
time to come up with a really great prog album and that’s exactly
what didn’t happen. If you take a look at all the official albums
of Fish, you’ll see that there are actually very few real prog
albums there. If you really try, you could say that ‘Vigil in a
Wilderness of Mirrors’ (1990) could be called prog, but all the
other CDs, in the best case, are just good rock. And this is the
case again. ‘A Field of Crows’ is a very good rock album, even one
of the better ones from Fish. But that’s where it stops. Several
songs sound more than nice, some even strong to very strong (for
example, “Exit Wound” and “Scattering Crows”), but there is no real
prog song in the bunch. The only time that Fish recorded a real
prog song (after having left Marillion) is, as far as I know, on the
‘Into the Electric Castle’ album (1998, “Isis and Osiris”). The
music, in this case, was composed by Ayreon (Arjen Anthony
Lucassen).
The question is whether or not the
true prog lover should spend his hard earned cash on this CD or on
some other CD by, for example, an unknown band that fulfils the prog
desire. At the rate that prog CDs are released, you don’t have to
wait even a whole month to buy a good one.
I think it’s a pity that a band like
Fish, who was once a shining example of prog in the ‘80s, has not
since then been able to reach the quality level of previous songs
like ”Script of a Jester’s Tear” or “Fugazi”. And that’s already
eight years ago. You be the judge… |
