LONG SEASON

I don't often review and with good reason. Not only are my communication skills not where I would like them to be, but I like to experience music, not dissect it. Putting on "paper" what I feel, how the music deeply can touch me ends up feeling like I am trivializing the experience, just skimming the surface of what can be great emotional depths. It can feel like such a superficial exercise and in the end I wonder, is this review more about me or the music? I want the main focus to be about my personal, unique experience with the music as we all experience and hear music rather differently. It is a subjective relationship between the music and the listener. Here is my extemporaneous commentary.

Fishmans is an act that was active in Japan in the 90s. Sadly, the leading man of the band, Shinji Satoh, died in 1999, which put an end to the act, mostly... The band dabbled in reggae, pop, dub, dream pop, spacey music, Neo-psych, ambient music, Shibuya-kei, funk, blues, experimental music, and post-rock sounds during its career.

Long Season, which is Fishmans' penultimate album, is commonly considered to be its greatest work, both for the studio version and live versions of it. It is split up into parts on albums, but really is one long piece with different sections. The first section is quite psychedelic with a theme that I immediately loved, then it gets very ambient, and then it goes back to the theme and builds a wonderful crescendo.

Some would find this album too repetitive, but music often resonates more deeply with me when themes are repeated with variations and built on. Repetition can bring a sense of euphoria to me or great annoyance. This fits the former. The repetition of this album helps with making it more hypnotic, transcendent, reverberatory, and it builds up the crescendo. I love crescendos. It also is a lush album and subtle. And many no doubt would dislike the extended ambient/experimentalish section and think this 35 minute piece would be better at half the length. I like the state that puts me in and it makes me enjoy all the more what comes later. Another issue some would have with this is the production and vocals, but to me they work. I find Long Season to be a very unique album even if I get some of the same feel from some Sufjan Stevens (say with "Impossible Soul"), and Boris' Flood to some extent.

While this was the first Fishmans album I heard and fell for, I later discovered the live version of Fishmans for their final concert (Satoh died three months later) titled 98.12.28 Otokotachi no wakare. That live is a version that I could and have listened to over and over again, and I have played that a lot over the past months. It is longer than this version, but flies by. It is more energetic, more lively, more exciting, the crescendo is much bigger. It is much better suited to a live performance. I reviewed and gave the album that it is off a five with "Long Season" being the highlight song off it. When I put this studio album on again, it did not enthrall me as much. It is more delicate, more subtly ambient, more subtle generally, smaller, more fragile, can be cold but also warm, sparse yet lush.

I thought to give this a four in comparison to the other, but having not played the studio version in quite some time while being besotted by that live performance, I knew I should spin this again. And then I wanted to spin it again. I spun the studio version three times in a row, and each time I experienced the music deeper and appreciated this version for what it is, for the beauty it contains, and how this uniquely moves me. The lives are not better, I believe, they're different. Each "Long Season" version I have heard has its own mystique and qualities to appreciate.

Numbers don't mean much when it comes to art, unless perhaps, say, you are a mathematician with the soul of a poet, but while I first thought I would give it a four, I am comfortable with a five (we don't have fractions) because I think that this is a truly remarkable release... beautiful and spiritual for me. This does not mean that I think that most Prog fans would rate it as highly, but I consider it to be a masterwork of its own idiom/ilk and of sufficient originality at the time of release to warrant such a high rating.

(This review was written in Sep 12 2022)

For many, obscurity and popularity are two things that never cross paths. For them, it's either you never heard of them, or you've heard everything from them. I would like to break this process away from the status quo, since I fully believe that an album can be both obscure and very popular, as long as you know where to go. In online music communities, people can find and hear albums they never knew existed before, and that is generally how I discover most of my music. Music circles share albums from one hand to the next like two cars passing by each day. In that sharing of two separate, but equally musical things, people grow attachments and love for some albums, some of which they never heard of before. There are communities built up from the groundwork for finding new and interesting music, such as Rate Your Music, Album Of The Year, a lot of music-focused Discord communities, and even my little darling that is ProgArchives. The internet, while being a bit of a dumpster fire in most places, helped a lot in terms of finding new joys in life that no one in the history of time could comprehend. So in that context, it is safe to say that without the internet, not many people would know about the Japanese band, Fishmans, and their album, Long Season.

Formed in 1987 in Minato, Tokyo, Fishmans was formed by the founding members of the late Shinji Sato (Vocals, Guitar, Trumpet), Kin-Ichi Motegi (Drums, Sampler), and Kensuke Ojima (Guitar, Vocals). Kensuke would leave the band in 1994. Two more members joined the group in the later years of 1988 and 1990, that being Yuzuru Kashiwabara (Bass), and Hakase-Sun (Keyboards). Their music often falls in the same boat as The Flaming Lips, being a blend of dreamy pop music with Neo Psychedelic Rock, however, they have done more ambient pop, and progressive pop music as well, especially found on this album. In recent decades, they have gotten a good following over the years, especially on sites like Rate Your Music, where this album is considered the #1 album of all time in 1996 with a rating of 4.19/5.0 from over 20 thousand ratings. It is clear that this album or more accurately song is one that many people fell in love with, and to be honest, I really do get the hype and care surrounding this entire album, because it is really good, however, I would be remiss to not point on something I do not particularly find that great on this album.

This album is one big 35-minute epic that goes through this abstract valley of sound and noise. Sometimes you get flavors of very dreamy keyboard and drum playing skills, mixed in with a wide array of varying instruments, from violins, to sound effects, bells, and some tribal beats as well. This whole song feels very much like waking up from a dream and having that dazed confusion while hearing your alarm clock blaring in your ears. Everything here feels very abstracted, and I think in some, mostly good areas, it works. I think the best thing about this song is that I always come out of it fairly good, and while that goes for most epics I listen to, hearing this more surreal type of music being pushed to half an hour in length and getting out of it does surprise me a lot. Usually, I would only ever truly love it if it was something like Tangerine Dream or Jean Michel Jarre where you can get very loose and experimental forms of longer music, but here in a more rock/pop context, it makes me surprised to see it come through so well. Every bit and part of this song is very airy, and I think the band was aware of the space they were given for this song since you get a ton out of it while still keeping up with what the intended sound should be. Everything is consistent in its direction, so props have been given. Oh, and also the singing is very well done. I do dig how soft the vocals here are, they feel very in line with the music being played here.

However, the song also can suffer from that abstract sound that I praised in the last paragraph. Like trying to remember a dream, some parts I have trouble trying to remember because sometimes this song can feel very boring at times, or just too Avant Garde to where it gets lost in the weirdness. It seems like a lot of times they get lost in trying to find a new but consistent direction for the song to take, and sometimes they can find their way to a new place that'd improve things, sometimes it feels as though they cannot seem to know how to get through the thicket and end up scraping and bumping into things that do not go well with this epic. Honestly, I feel like they could've made this song even better if they reworked the parts at 14:35 through 27:00, especially that part where it's tribal drumming with a weird repetitive sound effect looping a bit, and that violin part. Honestly, that violin is the worst part of the song, it is so ear-grating that when I hear it I most often than not turn my volume down to be much quieter so I cannot hear it. Honestly, this song would be one of my favorites if it didn't seem like they get lost in their direction and focus on those middle pieces.

I get why this album is very beloved, and I do enjoy a good deal of parts on here, heck I'd say most of the good elements on here outway the bad, but I cannot in good faith say this is a must-listen, or would recommend it to anyone due to those middle parts. It's still a perfectly good album, but not one that I can really adore. If you want some other more dreamy psychedelic or more atmospheric psychedelic rock music then this could be a good place, but I'd suggest being acquainted with other types of bands or projects before hearing this one.