Phish’s Trey Anastasio has announced his first acoustic solo album, Mercy, which will arrive on March 11.
Mercy features nine songs written over the course of the pandemic. The album was produced by Bryce Goggin and Robert “rAab” Stevenson, and engineered and mixed by Mike Fahey. The LP will come with new liner notes written by music journalist and Rolling Stone contributor/critic/editor David Fricke.
For the liner notes, Anastasio described Mercy as “a bookend.” He continued: “It’s two years since we went into hiding. This is still going on, and it’s an even lonelier trip… Here I was, still at home, playing acoustic guitar. I thought, ‘These songs just want to be one guy with a guitar, singing.’”
While the songs on Mercy came about over the past two years, the album does have some pre-pandemic roots in the solo acoustic shows Anastasio first played in 2017, then continued in 2018 and 2019. Those gigs largely comprised unplugged, stripped-down versions of Phish songs, and Anastasio admits he was surprised to realize the band’s intricate jams and compositions could still flourish when pared back to their core components.
“I found this weird thing happening where ‘Maze’ worked on an acoustic guitar,” Anastasio quipped of the eight-minute track from 1993’s Rift. “‘It’s about the jam, the organ solo.’ Turns out it wasn’t. It was about the lyrics and the music.”
While Mercy will mark Anastasio’s first acoustic album, it’s his 12th solo effort overall, following 2020’s Lonely Trip. Phish, meanwhile, released their own most recent studio album, Sigma Oasis, in 2020 as well.
The Trey Anastasio Band has a handful of festival and headlining dates scheduled for April and May. Phish will kick off its own tour at the end of May with shows scheduled all the way through September, including a rescheduled/belated “New Year’s Eve” run at Madison Square Garden in April (the proper end-of-December jaunt was postponed due to Covid-19).
After first rising to prominence with the expansive, 1980s-inspired dream-pop of ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ and its standout tracks, Ethel Cain has spent much of her artistic journey trying to step away from that sound. She’s leaned into a moodier mix of drone, ambient rock, and raw analogue textures. “I’m not a fucking pop artist,” the Tallahassee singer once told The FADER, adding, “I reject that wholeheartedly.” Her experimental projects ‘Perverts’ and ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ make that stance very clear, and her latest tour often feels like a firm break from the softer sounds that brought her into the spotlight.
For the first of her five headline nights at Hammersmith Apollo, Hayden Anhedönia builds a scene that feels like a slightly playful, gently eerie B-movie graveyard. She spends most of the performance tucked inside a moss-covered altar, surrounded by dramatic lighting and a crucifix mic stand. The show is nearly silent when it comes to onstage chatter. The rare moments she does address the audience are understated and easy to miss. When a fan shouts their love for her, she responds with a simple “Thank you!” from the darkness.
Instead of walking the stage to build energy, the lighting design carries that weight, mirroring the intensity of her songs. During the gritty, heavy ‘Dust Bowl’, she sings inside a slowly circling beam of light that sweeps across the Apollo with piercing brightness, while strobing green and white lights heighten the tension during long instrumental passages.
Ethel Cain. Credit: Connie Burke
As the warm, rough-edged guitars of ‘Knock At The Door’ fill the room, the production shows it can match the strange, atmospheric side of Cain’s catalogue, even if those moments are rare tonight. The set doesn’t lean heavily on ‘Perverts’, but brief pieces of ‘Houseofpsychoticwomn’ and the title track make their way in. The industrial ballad ‘Vacillator’ appears in full, bathed in stark white light as she softly sings, “If you love me, keep it to yourself,” on a track heavy with buried emotion.
For the most part, the night is devoted to ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’. The album slows the cinematic Southern Gothic of her debut ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ and explores the dizzying pull of a teenage love triangle. The shimmering synths of ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ and the lush strings of ‘Nettles’ bring an early glow, before the performance drifts into hazy ambient dream-rock reminiscent of Grouper. The mood is thick and steady, though it lacks big shifts in dynamics, leaving the set on a single emotional wavelength.
When ‘Tempest’ is briefly stopped and restarted so medics can help an audience member, ‘Waco, Texas’ follows as the main set closer. The encore then pivots toward older material, shifting the tone entirely. After a heartfelt ‘A House in Nebraska’, Anhedönia steps out from behind her green altar for the first and last time, moving into the brighter side of her discography with ‘Crush’ and ‘American Teenager’. Even though she has expressed discomfort with her most well-known tracks, their contrast with her darker material gives the finale a powerful lift. After holding the room in quiet tension for so long, their arrival feels like a release that lands with even greater impact.
