The Story of the Ghost November 15, 1998 - The Houston Chronicle by Marty Racine Album Review - The Story of the Ghost For a supposed exercise in improvisation, Phish sure does a lot of thinking on The Story of the Ghost, its 15th and perhaps most disarming album. This set of "jams" has all the spontaneity of a campaign speech. Following a 1997 European tour, the Vermont quartet retired to a farmhouse and Bearsville Studios "very much in the mindset of extended jamming," said keyboardist Page McConnell. Oh. Then kick out the jams, brother. Phish's idea of cutting loose is to record hours of instrumental noodling, calculate their utility, slap on lyrics from the moon-in-June poetry of lyricist Tom Marshall, embellish with the fruit of several songwriting sessions, tweak it all in the studio and cull 14 " songs" from a bounty of 39. The result is a measured, half-baked disc of cute little snippets. For all its ambition, Phish merely dabbles in cosmetology, offering soundbites of the weird in weightless melodies, cartoonish rhythms, cloying progressions and the worst sort of hippie-dippy sentiments. Gee, they sing about the circus, "where dreams can take flight." And, gosh, "Birds of a feather are flocking outside" (repeated ad nauseam) and "I've been wading in the velvet sea." Or, check this line from the ultra annoying and pretentious jazz-fusion piece, Guyute, "I'm bouncing like a newborn elf/I can't remain inside myself." Only a sense of humor could excuse this drivel, and humorous Phish isn't. OK, no humor, then wisdom, right? Not here: "The terrible thing about hell/Is that when you're there you can't even tell." Say what? Listen, it's one thing to be influenced by the Grateful Dead, quite another to anoint yourself as the Dead's heir. The Dead took its cue from the breadth of Americana, from bluegrass to blues, jug band to jazz. You can hear Phish on the sidelines saying, "Far out, man! Can we try that, too?" What you have for the '90s is a one-dimensional group of dweebs with a distilled knowledge of psychedelic rock history and offbeat enough to be labelled experimental. In the era the group so admires, its goofy Phishing expeditions would have been laughed off the stage. 1 star © 1998 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company