Fishboy, Classic Creeps

Fishboy, Classic Creeps

Reviewed by: Christian Hagen

Regular readers of the site may recall that I’m an absolute sucker for concept albums. Look at some of my favorite albums of all time: Ziggy Stardust, Janelle Monae’s The Archandroid, The Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love, Danger Mouse’s recent Rome, a concept album in name but so loosely connected it hardly qualifies. Hell, Coheed and Cambria was my favorite band in high school. Something about unlocking the mysteries in a song-based plotline really grabs me. This isn’t to say that I love all concept albums; I still can’t get into Rush, for example, despite the fact that they made the album that most people think of when they hear the term “concept album,” 2112. But it’s undeniable that I have an affinity for carefully-crafted epics or minor tomes converted from thrown-away novellas into catchy or grandiose songcraft.

Yet for all the concept albums I’ve ever listened to, I can honestly say that I’ve never heard one quite like Fishboy’s Classic Creeps.

Twee, though a term tossed around a little too much in the indie scene, describes Fishboy pretty securely. In their eleventh year of recording music (odd that I’ve never heard them before today), Fishboy sound like a young, energetic, impossibly upbeat group of lads who happen to have written an album that is supposedly the first in a planned series centered around ten main characters (each introduced in their own song on this record) who cross each other’s paths in sometimes extremely loose ways.

But while the concept is very clear here (the storytelling is often so unambiguous it’s comical), it somehow feels wrong to lump Classic Creeps in with the long history of prog-rock melodrama around which many concept albums have been unfortunately associated.

The songs rarely reach the largesse associated with a rock opera. Indeed, they sound like they could have been recorded in a basement by a band of high school students on summer vacation. This isn’t really an insult; Fishboy recalls some of the great indie-garage-pop bands of the last decade or two, especially Born Ruffians, The Apples in Stereo, Belle and Sebastian, The New Pornographers, though a slightly more toned-down version of each.

In fact, the songs are so catchy and danceable, it’s possible that, were the lyrics a little less blatant, it might be easy to ignore the story and just enjoy the ride. As someone who can’t really ignore story, even when I want to, I only hear a silly, loose plot yelped by a dance-party rock band, instead of the latter on their own. But even then, Classic Creeps provides plenty of moments so infectious they will stick with a listener for hours, even days.

Songs like “Alyson Revere” and the simple refrain of “Andre Revere” (“His name is Andre/his name is Andre”) stick like glue. Note, by the way, the titles of these songs, each beginning with the letter “A,” not-so-coincidentally the first letter of the first name of every character (save Victor Allen Moss, listed here as “Allen Moss, Victor”). It’s this sort of vaguely unnecessary but fairly adorable attention to detail that makes  Fishboy entertaining. Just look at track 9, “Autumn the Owl (Mistakes the Feelings of Being in Love with the Feelings of Being an Owl).” If that title doesn’t make you giggle at least a little, I defy you to prove to me that you have a heart.

But the track titles, the storyline, the hand-embroidered album art: These are trappings for the music itself, and shouldn’t be of primary concern to anyone who’s not unnaturally obsessed with pop music masquerades. In terms of music, it’s solid indie-pop, as solid as one should expect from a group called Fishboy, though it’s bizarre that an eleven-year-old band should sound so fresh, like they’ve just finished their first show. Occasional horn parts aside, most of the songs on Classic Creeps play out like a band with the freedom that comes from no one having ever heard of you before.

The only song that fits the grandiose rock mold is “Ava Aviaria,” the seven-minute closer that switches rhythms, tempos, energies, and moods several times throughout its run and is only a little tired by the end. The rest of the album bounces so briskly from track to track it’s almost hard to grasp the characters they’re presenting, most notably at the beginning as the band moves smoothly from “Aaron the Afterthought Astronaut” to “Adrian Simmons” such that one would be forgiven for thinking they were the same song.

A listener’s enjoyment of Classic Creeps will hinge equally on two things: One’s ability to swallow/ignore a bizarre, often amusing plot that includes elements of space and time travel, detectives and gangsters, child superheroes, bear hunting, owls with human emotions, and little people solving mysteries; and one’s capacity for sunshine-punk belted through straining vocal chords with blasting horns and splashing cymbals. It’s damned fun, and definitely worth a listen, though whether I say that because it’s a concept album or not I can’t say for certain.