self-titled - Trey Anastasio May 22, 2002 - Jambands.com by Chris Bertolet Album Review - Trey Anastasio Trey Anastasio, bless his freckled kiester, has never played coy about his influences. From the critic-proof pedigree of legends like Ravel and Ellington and Hendrix to mall-boy fodder like Boston, he seems as happy to sing their praises in print or on camera as he is to wring their music from the neck of his Languedoc, drop by drop, re-imagined and re-inflected in ways ineffably Trey. In his prior life, which now sits in some cruel state of suspended animation, Anastasio was the firing pin for Phish's shotgun spray eclecticism. He catalyzed his band mates and they followed boldly, presumably either too naïve, blunted, or blissed-out gaga in love with music to know that Gershwin and Zeppelin were two great tastes best left unacquainted (or so said Conventional Wisdom). Phish's aesthetic, and Anastasio's, was deviant and simple: throw a party for music and invite everybody except Conventional Wisdom, then pump up the volume and let the kids gape and wiggle. The result was a cosmic juggernaut, a blinding light in a dimming rock & roll universe, something genuinely novel under the sun. As Phish lumbered and pitched toward its peak, it gulped styles and idioms down its maw with insatiable abandon and vomited them out in glorious tangles of smoldering newness, with the brazen confidence of a mad scientist vindicated by hard won success. At the crest of the wave, Phish's mode of stage play became so effortless, intimate and open that raw feeling often dripped like blood from slashes in the band's collective skin. Seeing Phish at Hampton in 1997 (among many other jaw-dropping performances that year) must have been like watching Charlie Chaplin shed his first celluloid tear -- funny and sad and beautiful and unexpected and wonderful and cataclysmic and plain fucking awesome. Who can say - maybe not even the players themselves - what began the slow Phish fade, roughly three years on stage and nearly two years off? Maybe we can find clues in the occasional belch of brilliance like Big Cypress, and maybe not. Maybe it's scary having God hurtle into your heart and out your instrument, and maybe peaks are called peaks for good reason, and maybe not. Maybe all will be clear when Phish returns to the stage. And maybe not. One thing is for damn sure: it is impossible to estimate anything those musicians do otherwise without a nod to the yawning void that Phish left in its wake. Yeah, nature abhors a vacuum. The question is, does it love the Trey Anastasio Band? If you believe Trey, and you should, this band draws inspiration from fewer influences than did Phish. On the conceptual level, the project is a deliberate menage of the tongue-and-groove compositional style of big band Duke, the staccato horn attack of the JBs, and the African pulse of King Sunny Ade and the Kutis. In truth, most Phish fans know fuck all about any of those guys, but no matter. It looks good on paper, a tasteful confection; all critic-proof pedigree. In concert, it's way bootylicious, a hell of a way to spend a summer evening. But, presented as a musical document, it has the halting, sanitized, academic feel of a thesis from a student who feels unworthy of his forebears. Ye Phishies who enter need not abandon all hope, but don't be foolish enough to hope for abandon. Alas, it's in short supply. Trey and his band run best in high gear. Lead track "Alive Again" - whose chorus sounds suspiciously like a poke at Phish's notoriously critical fans - is an ambitious mosaic of Cubanismo, overlapping horns, party whistles, doubled vocals, and a nifty little bridge that sounds lifted from the "Streets of San Francisco" theme. "Push On 'Til The Day" suggests Tito Puente on crank, or Steely Dan without the male pattern cynicism; its sheer inertia is virally contagious, its brass parts aptly big-n-brassy. "Money, Love and Change," a ripping, all-too-short blast of woozy soul and fusion, manages to transcend some busy studio trickery and make some righteous noise -- and even a point. The deliciously serpentine "Last Tube" sprawls out nicely, tossing a welcome bone to jam partisans. Not that the song lacks tight construction; its spiraling eastern melodies weave dizzy patterns around Afro beats with impeccable color and sense. But at the halfway mark, minutes after the album's average track has ended, Trey trades phrases with Jennifer Hartswick's muted trumpet, starting an unruly playground kibbutz that builds patiently to a fever pitch. It's the album's triumphant moment... and arguably its Phishiest. A few up-tempo joints fall just short of the mark. The boogie blues "Cayman Review" tells of a tequila bender gone loco and double entendres about oral sex with some chick named Louise, and damned if there isn't something a little sad about that. If Anastasio and his verbal yin Tom Marshall hoisted the flag of youth with Phish's anthemic "Chalk Dust Torture", here they hoist the flag of midlife crisis. It was dope being young, can't I rage while I'm old?! Trey gets his Beatle on with "Mr. Completely", a careening spill of psychedelia that birthed the band's most inspired and reaching jams last summer. Here, it's fenced in, with barely a whiff of bombast or risk. The album only truly falters in its earnest moments. "Flock Of Words" is a pained AOR ballad in the vein of "Waste", which is to say that it could probably find a cozy home on a Sheryl Crow record, and "Drifting" is a well-meant misfire, a cringe-inducing Hallmark card set to music. Far be it from me to slag a great man's desire to write a silly love song, but it's my job to tell you straight and so I will: Donny and Marie would feel entirely comfortable performing this oozy treacle wherever Donny and Marie still perform. "At The Gazebo" sounds like an obscure Beethoven piece, but in the end it's a delightful little etude that deserves its own spot on an album of delightful little etudes. The roughly 75,000 credited contributors on this record all comport themselves well, if modestly. Sometimes too modestly. Case in point: Anastasio has called bassist Tony Markellis "The Yoda of Groove". I suppose this is true if you imagine that Yoda spent thousands of years doing little besides napping in a swamp, waiting for Jedi to drop out of the fog. While I appreciate musical restraint as much as the next guy, and while I grasp the importance of a rock solid bottom, it seems that Markellis has yet to meet a note or series of notes that he doesn't love enough to play over and over until I feel hypnotically compelled to buy Dockers and a La-Z-Boy. He's a machine, and I'm not sure I don't mean that in the most Huxleyan sense of the word. But I digress. By no means is Trey Anastasio an unpleasant listen. It's a mature piece of work; it won't piss off your parents, and you could crank it on a bus or in the park without fear of incarceration or physical harm. It'll even move your caboose in fits and starts. But will it make you want to sequester yourself in your den for hours on end with Messrs. Graffix und Sennheiser, searching doggedly between the notes for the bold, furthur sound of enlightenment? I doubt it. And I have to wonder, is that too much to expect? Trey Anastasio grows up. Ain't life a bitch.