Review Summary: Over the horizon of every daydream: Fishmans' first classic
What makes magic records magic? How d’ya catch
that feeling everyone is talking about? When is it appropriate for music to scale your powers of expression back to those of a five-year-old. I dunno, let’s talk about Fishmans. What a classic band; what a magical band; what a hopeless band to write about. What an unhelpful start. Let’s do a story.
Fishmans’ history is a simple one: an unassuming Japanese group establish a unique hybrid of dream-pop and dub, produce three cult classics in a row, and then break up after the untimely death of their frontman in 1999. Though none of their work was released outside of Japan, their legacy has grown lopsidedly across the internet, underrepresented in a general sense but gatekept to the point of fanaticism by an ever-consolidating fanbase. This can easily pose an obstacle: talk about Fishmans without specifically addressing either die-hard fans or total newcomers, and it’s hard to form a clear view of your audience. Find a way around that, and you’re stuck with the difficulty of pinning down what made their sound so compelling to begin with. Why do they continue to inspire such levels of protective adoration? It’s easy enough to pinpoint the band’s charm: there’s something childish in the blitheness of their melodies; something fay in Shinji Sato’s androgynous delivery; and something timeless in the spaciousness of their arrangements, but this is an inadequate break down of what made them a remarkable band. Where does magic come from?
I think
Kuuchuu Camp is the easiest digest of why Fishmans at their best are so enduringly special. It was here that they first pinned down their iconic sound and reached a wider audience, hitting the modest peak of #88 in the Oricon chart. This was their greatest commercial success, and weighing it against their other charting records, it’s easy enough to see why: the legendary album-song
Long Season was indifferent to commercial conventions, their inadvertent swansong
Uchuu Nippon Setagaya’s rainy day psychedelia was never destined to conquer the mainstream, and 1994’s jaunty
Orange had yet to nail their defining sound. On the other hand,
Kuuchuu Camp is the most forthright assertion of the classic Fishmans sound; this was the record where everything came together for them, and they lay down definitive moments with corresponding confidence. Much of the album cuts straight to the heart of the Fishmans experience within heartbeats: you get it in the haunting guitar line that kicks off opener “Zutto Mae” and in in the two-line refrains that Sato half-murmurs over “Shiawase-sha” and “Subarashiku Nice Choice”’; the sauntering reggae groove of the iconic “Baby Blue” is drenched with essence du Fishman, and it hangs thick in the space between notes on the dawn breeze of a closer “Atarashii Hito”.
That’s enough fan service for the die-hards; y’all knew what the vintage bits were. Let’s wrap up for the new gang - what, uh,
is the Fishmans experience? It comes down to two things (probably), the first and most obvious of which is their good ol’ ambling reverie. The band’s rhythm section lays down a robust set of dub grooves, yet the great space afforded by the mix to each player together with the delicacy of each track’s atmosphere renders their momentum strangely weightless. “Baby Blue” and “Night Cruising” thrive on this and make a good deal of sense as the biggest Fishmans songs, then and now. The former’s blithe reggae strollalong and the latter’s aching piano motif fare well being repeated to oblivion, sublimating common measurements of distance and time into dream logic. Both are iconic, and in a similar fashion, much of this album is circuitous but straightforward in its trajectory, and all the better for it.
There’s obvious easygoing chillout value here, but I personally have never latched onto Fishmans for feelgood reasons. There’s a melancholy sense of tension here, and it adds considerable stakes and pathos to the band’s otherwise innocuous progressions. Pleasant as they are, Fishmans’ daydreams are never just dreaming for dreaming’s sake; these tracks are redolent of
something instantly recognisable but just out of reach. You know that feeling: trying to clutch onto a half-remembered dream that feels oddly significant for reasons that will never make full sense to you. This band are all over it. “Zutto Mae”’s near-haunting melodies and lyrics pick no bones about setting this out (“Even things that happened yesterday feel like the distant past” is a particular takeaway), and this sense of fleeting moments and the insecurity of liminal space takes hold of the album faster than you can google
mono no aware. “Night Cruising” evokes dreamlike suspension of disbelief along with a persistent doubt that its magic could disintegrate at any moment, while “Subarashikute Nice Choice”’s chorus is a flicker of uncertainty in an otherwise unbroken trance. It’s this fragility that gives
Kuuchuu Camp and Fishmans as a whole such beautiful intrigue; the best tracks here hinge around it, and the weakest are uncoincidentally the only ones that largely disregard it. As such, the superficially upbeat pairing of “Slow Days” and “Sunny Blue” backfires as a plodding midway lull. It’s a pity that they make up a full quarter of the album, but the exemplary second half restores the atmosphere so quickly that this only registers as a brief-ish blip once it’s passed (up until which point, it feels like a microeternity). Can’t be helped; for the remaining six tracks, the stakes are all there.
So, music and magic; that’s how it comes together here. Perhaps. Fishmans conjure up the kind of strollable blissout that will make happy people happier, sad people sadder and wavy people very much wavier. Their sound is evocative and open-ended, but never vague enough to fall prey to drippy-hippy canvas-of-dreaming psych bullshit; these tracks are anchored in gloriously concrete rhythms, rich with half-remembered associations, and performed with a wistfulness so pronounced it’s almost painful. It’s an evasive thing to map out, but you’ll sure as hell know it when you feel it; to this end, the album’s branding is bang on the money.
Kuuchuu Camp literally means “Midair Camp”, but the standardised English
Something In The Air is one of the more incisive translational rebrands I’ve come across.
Something in the air. Hmm. Twenty-five years later and it’s still there. What’s up?
