Highest in the Land

Released just after the death of Pat Fish, the Jazz Butcher's guiding light, The Highest in the Land is a fitting epitaph to a career spent balancing gentle sophistication and raucous humor while delivering some of the oddest, most affecting pop music of the post-punk and indie pop era. Written over a span of many years and recorded with a small band featuring long-time cohort Max Eider on guitar, the record is a relaxed affair musically, relying on the sparse sound of a small band playing, never working up much of a lather while jangling quietly and leaving plenty of space for Fish's undiminished vocals and mordant wit. His focus is split between railing against Brexit and the isolation from the rest of the world it entailed, and his own mortality. It's clear from his lyrical position that the bout with cancer he fought -- and seemed to have won before he suddenly passed -- affected him deeply. The laid-back blues ramble "Time" looks back at his life with an unvarnished eye and lament