While listening to Rift, it's become apparent that many bands had problems during the 90s when it came to album creation and sequencing. The CD era really got going during the early 90s, so artists had to rethink the idea of the 'album' as it applied to the CD. No more were you sequencing with the 'two sides of a record, with a maximum of 30 minutes per side' format. Now, you had 78 minutes to work with and the whole thing was continuous. Paradoxically, then, it was during this time that the "CD skip" culture came into being. Most music listeners always just wanted to hear a few good songs per album, so they either bought 45 singles or dealt with the annoyance of manually moving the needled on a record player. Now, with CDs, they could skip around easily at will. But for bands still trying to make artistic statements with their albums, what to do??A few years back, some indie label put out a list of rules for albums. Tongue in cheek though it was, one of their mandates has always held sway for me: an album should be about 45 minutes or less. Any more than that, and you should release a double album but you had better be damn sure your music was good enough to necessitate that. Maybe this is an arbitrary rule that doesn't (or that shouldn't) apply to all bands, but I think more often than not, it's right. Perhaps we've just been programmed by years of music listening to feel this way, but I think there's something ingrained in most humans that we can only pay attention to one thing for so long. You can just feel when an album or movie is too long, right?? Willful or not, most bands seem to follow this dictum. In fact, Radiohead's last album was purposefully succinct, though at 42 minutes it's got nothing on, say, The Ramones or Reign In Blood.
Around about 1992 when Phish was recording Rift, they couldn't have been more out of step with the current musical trends. With the mainstream quickly pursuing grunge rock and the less-mainstream pursuing electronic music, hip hop, or indie rock, Phish were among the small but tight knit group of bands who took influence from the jam bands and prog rock of the 70s. Making most of their money and winning most of their fans from lengthy tours, one wonders why Phish bothered with a genuine, big-time record label, other than a better distribution channel for releases and some financial stability. Whatever the case, it didn't make for very good studio albums until Billy Breathes.
The problem with Rift is that, like A Picture of Nectar, it sounds like a disparate collection of songs and is overlong. Though I'm a huge fan of the band, I find the three studio albums between their indie days and Billy Breathes to be a wash. Rift bears the distinction of being pitched as a concept album about a guy dreaming about his girlfriend/ex-girlfriend, but the real story here is what a mess the album is. While I kind of admire that they put so many different styles and ideas on an album, it's even longer than A Picture of Nectar but not as focused. As for the album length: Junta was long, but it's a double album; Lawn Boy is 48 minutes; A Picture of Nectar is 60 minutes; by contrast, Rift is 67 minutes long and the subsequent Hoist, a stab at the mainstream, was 46 minutes. Admittedly, the much later Round Room is 77 minutes long, but it also hews much closer to the live sound, with more soloing and improvisation than any Phish studio album. So Rift is simultaneously the most overblown and long Phish album while also having the usual reserved studio sound with a sterile, overly crisp production.
While it's heresy among certain Phish fans to criticize studio albums, I think the real issue is that we're arguing different points. When I give the album a bad review, it's not the songs I dislike. In fact, I love every song on Rift, but in studio form they don't hang together in a satisfactory way. Phish live shows work amazingly well as long strings of only vaguely related songs, but when you try the same thing on a studio release, it does not work. This is at the heart of the problem with A Picture of Nectar, Rift, and Hoist; it's as if the band played a live show of the songs and the record label told them to release a condensed, studio version of that, with all the energy, improvisation, and segues taken out. Even Hoist, which has the same relative runtime as Billy Breathes, is overproduced and a mess.
I'm starting to feel like a broken record, but if you're a fan of the band, you'll want to get this album. Not right away, but eventually. However, everyone else can skip this one entirely. I honestly think it's the absolute weakest of the Phish studio albums and is the most extreme example of the problems of jam bands recording studio albums, making music that is bloodless but also overlong and messy.
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