SUITS

Fish's Suits album had a long germination, with some songs having seen live airings as far back as 1992 when he undertook his "Toile Tour" of small venues to workshop the material. The Songs From the Mirror and the headaches of his exit from Polydor intervened, but he would finally be able to record the final version of the album in late 1993 and early 1994, by which point the backing musicians (by and large the same team who had made Songs From the Mirror) were used to playing with each other and had spent extensive time on the road testing out much of this material.

The end result is an album which, in retrospect, I think has been sold short over the years. Are these Fish's best songs? Probably not - the songwriting on, say, his following album (Sunsets On Empire) would be better and structurally speaking many of these songs seem a bit loose and could do with tightening up. What you have here are some very well-performed and impeccably-produced renditions of B-grade songs, and it's the standard of performance which really helps buoy up the material and makes the material come across stronger than it otherwise should.

Stylistically, Suits is where you can find the seeds of the approach which Fish would later take on Sunsets On Empire - Pipeline, for example, could have been taken from that album quite happily - nestling alongside the remnants of the rather gentle, laid-back art-pop approach that Songs From the Mirror took. Neo-prog purists may struggle with it, but if you approach it as a mixture of art pop with a neo-prog mindset (shot through with moments of neo-prog with an art pop mindset), you might be better placed to appreciate it.

The folk flavourings that had worked into Fish's sound on Internal Exile are joined by some world music influences here. Whilst comparing Fish to Peter Gabriel is a bit samey, a glib parallel people have been eager to draw ever since they decided that Marillion was a Genesis clone band on the basis of the climactic section of Grendel, here the parallel is apt: this really feels like an album which takes Gabriel's So as one of its stylistic touchstones, at least on the quieter and more mellow tracks. In rockier, rowdier moments, it feels like Fish's neo-prog instincts are resurgent again, more than they perhaps have ever been over his entire solo career from Vigil In a Wilderness of Mirrors to this.

Some influences from current musical styles also enrich the stew; for instance, there's a somewhat trip-hop air at points, such as on Black Canal, a rather great song which was kept off non-CD editions of the album but really finds Fish engaging with a more modern sound whilst making it feel not like a break from his past styles but a further evolution of them.

On the whole, Suits might not be a mindblowing album, but it's far from clumsy, and what it lacks in tight songwriting it makes up for in atmosphere and heart. Though Fish wouldn't produce the first bona fide five-star classic of his solo career until the following Sunsets On Empire, on here he would undeniably chart the course that led there.