Reel Big Fish – Fame, Fortune and Fornication

Reel Big Fish are famous for taking classic songs and turning them into high energy third wave ska songs. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to find any of the band’s CDs without a least one cover song on it and their live show is always peppered with them. It was always a treat to hear their unique take on some classic songs but when you sit down to listen to the band’s newest full length, which contains ten cover songs, you find yourself asking “why?”

Why make an album of only cover songs? Why not write some new songs with their classical comical flare? And why, out of only ten songs, do they cover Poison twice? It just makes no sense. It takes away from their uniqueness. It was great to hear them add their spin to a song and mix it seamlessly into the album, but now that attraction isn’t able to hold through when every song is a cover.

Musically, the band has done what you’d expect from them. Each song sounds exactly like Reel Big Fish. Aaron Barrett’s vocals are spot on, the horn section is tight, the guitars create an upbeat rhythm and newcomer Derek Gibbs lays out some fantastic bass lines (particularly on Tom Petty‘s Won’t Back Downand The Eagles‘ The Long Run). Even the opening seconds of Veronica Sawyer sounds like Where Have You Been? – everything here is classic Fish.

Unfortunately, as you get past the halfway mark the record just feels bland and starts to blend together. So while Poison‘s Nothing But A Good Time kicks it off and introduces the album with a high energy party song and the inclusion of The Clash‘s I Fought The War in the midst of John Cougar Mellencamp‘sAuthority Song was genius, Fame, Fortune and Fornication still lacks a punch to really keep the listener’s full attention. It makes it so that somehow Desmond Dekker‘s reggae flavored Keep A Cool Head passes by without notice and Talk Dirty To Me (which features Tatiana DeMaria of Tat on vocals) is abysmally boring.

Not terrible by any means (Authority Song and Brown Eyed Girl are some of the best covers the band has ever done) but it still lacks an identity and I expected more from the Fish.