SASHIMI - LIVE IN POZNAN, POLAND 1999

Another great live album from the great Scotsman. The sound of this recording is top notch, and the songlist -- "Plague of Ghosts" and "Tumbledown," "Sunsets on Empire" and "Goldfish and Clowns, the opening three tunes from Clutching at Straws -- is awesome. Wow! It's the best tunes from the two best Fish solo albums and the best Marillion album. Toss in some classic Fish staples ("Lucky," "Brother 52," and "The Company") as well as some nice surprises (excellent versions of "Just Good Friends" and "Cliche") and you have the makings of a truly outstanding live recording. Enjoy.

Urgh. I want to like this live album from Fish, I really do. It's from the tour of one of his best albums (Raingods With Zippos), it has a performance of the entire Plague of Ghosts suite and the opening triptych from Clutching At Straws, it has Fish and his band in good form. In theory, all the ingredients of a great live release is there.

However, there's just too many technical faults. It's not that the recording quality has an inherently rough quality - this isn't an audience tape or something, this is a properly-recorded live gig which was being rebroadcast on Polish radio. Unfortunately, there's all these little glitches and problems which work their way into the thing - a shriek of feedback here, dodgy levels here, muffled sound there - and they're just prominent enough and frequent enough to throw you off.

Which is a shame, because Fish and company are clearly in a rambunctious, energetic mood here. It has all the ingredients of a four-to-five star live album, dragged down to two and a half stars-ish by the recording issues. The liner notes proudly state that there are no overdubs on the album; in this case, it's clearly to the detriment of the material here.