Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just brilliant! Buy this, and all the other phish albums., 29 Dec 2001
This is phishes first album (except for Gamehendge, which doesn't count) and is realy, REALY good. It has brilliant music, with some nice, long and interesting jam sessions. The lyrics are slightly less good in some songs, but in others, namely Fee and Ester, the lyrics are the best ever. But, the best track is undoubtably The Divided Sky, which cannot be described. Buy this now, you will make tthe world a better place and yourself a better person.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Start of Something Beautiful, 4 Mar 2008
Despite its unpromising hand-drawn black & white cover, Junta is one of the most fully-formed debuts that you're ever likely to hear, and is regularly mentioned as Phish's best studio album. It gave rise to several of the band's most highly regarded songs: including "You Enjoy Myself", "The Divided Sky", "David Bowie" and "Fluffhead/Fluff's Travels" which, alone, account for well over forty minutes of the album.
Opening with "Fee", a comic, childish story with a Latin-American feel and elegant jazz keyboards from Page McConnell, the album immediately announces its musical seriousness and complete absence of lyrical pomposity. While later albums may have gestured at deeper thoughts, the songs here all have lyrics that either are, or appear to be, completely nonsensical. "Esther" is a macabre cautionary tale that unwinds over a serene, uplifting musical background; "Fluffhead" seems even less serious, and it may therefore surprise some listeners to learn that it was occasioned by seeing a cancer patient at a Grateful Dead show. Generally, though, these are not songs where the lyrics are important: often they are just vestigial hooks on which a largely instrumental album is hung. "David Bowie" - whose title is also 50% of its lyric sheet - is the perfect example.
The contrast between the vocal and musical aspects of the album is very clear from "Foam", which is musically one of the most complex tracks on an extraordinarily "composed" album. The sustained jazz counterpoint here is such that it's difficult to label it even as progressive rock, let alone as rock. The only real point of comparison would be Frank Zappa, whose equally ambitious musical lines often accompanied lyrics that were deliberately inane. "Dinner and a Movie" - a musically dense song with only the repeated vocal line "Let's go out to dinner and see a movie" - has the slight feel of Zappa's social satire, although the musical composition is so recognisably that of Trey Anastasio that it would be impossible to mistake for the work of anyone else.
There might be merit to the accusation that this is all ingenious triviality but for the sheer quality of the music here. The soaring melodies of "The Divided Sky" are so compelling that it is easy to overlook the devilish intricacy of the song. "Fluff's Travels" pulls off the Gabriel-era Genesis trick of making a long song in multiple sections seem completely musically inevitable.
The album's original closer was the sweet, easy-listening "Contact" which brought things to a fitting end. When Junta was reissued on Elektra, however, its running length was padded out to a generous two hours by the addition of three extra tracks. "Union Federal", the first of these, is a dissonant free improvisation that goes on for over 25 minutes and is almost guaranteed to be every listener's least favourite track on the album. The other two tracks (both recorded live) are "Sanity", an inane and irritating dirge, and "Icculus", an off-cut from Anastasio's Gamehenge project that will only be of interested to Phish obsessives. The three additions, then, do their best to ruin an almost perfect album and are best skipped. Seen without them, the album takes a place deep into 5-star territory.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Album....Amazing Jam Band!!!!, 1 Nov 2006
Phish are a unique and trully exceptional band, which include mind-blowingly talented musicians. Their music on this album is expertly crafted and beautifully executed. Many of their songs seem random on the surface (David Bowie & Fee), but they are much more then they seem at first glance. This is certainly progressive music at its best, it combines so many genres into one unique sound. If you take snips of Floyd, elements of Genesis and a handful of The Dead, then you will gain a greater understanding to what Phish are all about on this debut album. If you are new to the Phish sound....Junta is a great start!
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