Phish FUEGO

The studio album has always been a slippery prospect for any jam band worth taking seriously. Even the earliest champions of live exploration (Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, etc.) turned in their share of notoriously spotty or confusing studio recordings, much preferring the stage as a place for their craft to really take form. Long-running jam-band institution Phish follow this to a T, releasing scads of live recordings that tend to find superior readings of tunes that come off stuffy or lifeless in their studio versions. Releasing new studio material seems to be a low priority for the band, with 12th studio album Fuego being released five years after 2009's Joy, which itself came after 2004's Undermind. The hallucinatory whimsy and unbridled exuberance Phish exude on-stage has been hard to capture in the confines of the studio, but the excellent and smartly crafted Fuego steps outside of this pattern in a few ways. The logical thing to do when recording a band championed for their e