The music of Reel Big Fish is a work of art comparable in cultural value to Homer's The Iliad, Michelangelo's David, and that picture of Albert Einstein with his tongue out.
Third-wave ska - more specifically, the branch of the reggae-related subgenre's third-wave that formed a sacred union with pop-punk, herein described as "punk with horns" - has always been kind of a curious phenomenon. But RBF founder and lone original member, guitarist and vocalist, Aaron Barnett, has never let that get in the way of his uncompromising, forward-thinking aesthetic vision.
And even though popular culture is long overdue for a fourth-wave, The Fish gracefully skank along like its still 1997 and/or another year when it was socially acceptable to wear checkered sneakers or grow some bitchin' mutton chops.
When Barnett sat down to write the band's most recent album, 2012's
Candy Coated Fury, he knew exactly what kind of sculpture he was going
to carve out of a raw, unshaped, heaping slab of proverbial marble.
"I
definitely was very conscious this time about how danceable the songs
were," the Rembrant of punk with horns told Amp Magazine last summer.
"And how they make you move when you listen to them." Last we checked,
the only way to dance to Reel Big Fish is in a circle and with the
herk-a-jerk of a rock 'em sock 'em robot. But, hey, like Andy Warhol
likely told Picasso: "I may not know how to skank. But I know what I
like."
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