AN EMOTIONAL FISH
An Emotional Fish, An Emotional Fish – Here is the story on this Irish band according to Allmusic; I knew nothing about them myself at the time: “Since they come from Dublin, are righteously political and their first two singles were on U2’s Mother record label, An Emotional Fish is frequently written off as a blatant U2 imitator; and there is no denying that they owe a large debt to those Irish superstars. While their music has the same droning guitar of U2, there are more Celtic touches than U2 at a similar stage, along with straighter pop hooks. Unfortunately, they were involved in a nasty scandal in the U.K. involving Radio 1. After that, their debut album was massacred by the critics; and the band essentially vanished, releasing records like 1993’s Junk Puppets and 1996’s Sloper to little notice.” What I have is their debut album, An Emotional Fish; the article on that album, with a rating of 4½ stars, has a different story: “The disappearance of An Emotional Fish was one of the great disappointments of the 1990s. Released in September of 1990, An Emotional Fish likely was a victim of the Rattle and Hum era U2 backlash.” Since Allmusic is written by a host of writers, there are sometimes different points of view shown. In any case, despite the odd name (hardly any band names start with “a” or “an”, other than A Flock of Seagulls – perhaps they got the idea from the 1988 hit film A Fish Called Wanda?), this is probably the best album that I got that day.
(December 2015)
