CD Review

Tinyfish
 "Tinyfish"

Rating : Scorchio!

reviewed by Poula Fisch

 After teasing us last autumn with their Summers End promo dick, at long last comes the Silhobbit review of the whole album from Simon Godfrey's miniature piscean boys. Now it's time to find out if it's a progging fish supper, or an old cod-piece, slightly damp, with an unusual odour.

Well, Motorville kick starts the whole bloody thing off to a reasonably bright start - heavy on the rhythms, with Paul Worwood's pounding bass and Sir Simon's energetic drums driving the track thru. The familiar melodic Fly Like A Bird swoops in with Nine Months On Fire hot on it's tail feathers, continuing the albums steady start. Gentleman Jim Sanders gets to play some delicious guitar on Fly Like A Bird (unspecified, but not likely to be a penguin). Anyways, these tracks should be familiar to regular listeners to our award winning radio show, or even downloaders of our progging progcasts. Because we've played them like.

So, on to the controversial Too High For Low Company, now this be the first of the new and strangely unfamiliar track on special offer here. It's a brooding bastard of a song, similar to something that might find it's way onto an The Urbane album, if such a thing ever happens again, but without the "I'm so hard done by, love me" lyrics. Maybe. It's a real gem of a song, with biting lyrics that suggest, even though the Tinyfish boys are playing at this years Summers End festival, and that spring is most definitely here, there's no sign of a spring thaw in the air.

All Of The People, All Of The Time is the shortest track on the album, with the longest title, and as such is deserving of the shortest review, yet probably gets more words written about it than any other track on the album. Even though it's just a short vocal interlude, spoken with much gravitas by the enigmatic Robert Ramsey. Magical!!

Anyway, it feeds nicely into Build Your Own Enemy, a slow, smouldering track, while God Eat God, as well as having a clever title, is a clever song, juxtaposing religious inquisitions with a catchy pop sensibility. What ever that is. Sundried is a short string quartet addition to Too High For Low Company, again dripping with with a virtuous animosity. Quite enchanting.

We played All Hands Lost on the radio a few short weeks ago, so I'm sure literally dozens of you already know this bittersweet tune inside out. The albums epic, clocking in at a Ferrari crunching 12 and a half minutes, it's a classic modern prog tour-de-france, bringing to mind classic era coastproggers, like Big Big Train, at their greatest, or even betterer.

The atmospheric, esoteric and eponymous Tinyfish brings the album to a screeching halt, in a blaze of smoke, like a dwarf in a library at 5:30 on a Tuesday. And I think we all know what that's like, don't we!

So, what does this album tell us about the band that they're beginning to call "the Tinyfish of the new millenium"?

Are they likely to be around for long, or will they be a splash in the pan, like ice under sun, or mist in the wind?

Well, it tells us none of that really, because only time will tell, but it does show a band with great potential, who have produced a debut album that is as solid as a solid rock, and one that improves with each listen!