- Perfume River
- All Loved Up
- Blind To The Beautiful
- A Feast Of Consequences
- High Wood
- Crucifix Corner
- The Gathering
- Thistle Alley
- The Leaving
- The Other Side Of Me
- The Great Unravelling
Banquets of Memory, Served with Blood and Weather
A Feast of Consequences finds Fish not merely returning to form but reclaiming the long-form storytelling that has always set him apart. This is an album made by an artist who has worn the weight of decades - personal, political, emotional - and now chooses to distill those experiences into something both intimate and epic. The result is a work that feels lived-in and fiercely articulate, delivered with a clarity that only comes from having survived a great deal and understood even more.
There’s a sense of elemental honesty woven through the entire record. Fish has always been a writer of landscapes - internal and external - and here he paints them with a weathered precision, as if each lyric were a page torn from a journal smudged by rain and regret. His voice, aged into a grainy warmth, becomes a narrative instrument in itself: less about perfection than presence, commanding attention through texture and conviction. Rather than hiding the years, he leans into them, crafting a performance that feels raw yet assured.
Musically, the album straddles intimacy and scale with remarkable poise. The arrangements feel organic, almost tactile, as though assembled from wood, wind, and earth instead of traditional instrumentation. There’s a cinematic patience to the pacing - grand when it needs to be, yet unafraid of restraint. The band surrounding Fish plays with the kind of maturity that understands drama is not measured by volume alone. Dynamics become emotional contours, allowing the stories to breathe, brood, and erupt in their own time.
What anchors the album is its preoccupation with consequence - not just the aftermath of personal choices but the collective weight of history. Fish engages with themes of legacy, conflict, belonging, and accountability, but he never lapses into preaching. Instead, he offers meditations: some tender, some scalding, all deeply human. The emotional resonance comes from recognizing that consequences are not abstractions; they are lived realities, rippling through generations and shaping the stories we inherit and pass on.
Yet for all its gravity, A Feast of Consequences is not a dour album. It is resolutely alive, full of empathy and hard-won wisdom. There’s a surprising warmth beneath its hard edges, a sense of reconciliation with the turbulence that defines a life fully lived. Fish writes like someone aware of time’s shortening runway, but instead of despair, he responds with clarity and generosity - an impulse to make sense of the past rather than flee from it.
In the end, the album feels like a banquet in the truest sense: a gathering of memories, wounds, and revelations laid out with unflinching honesty. It invites you not to consume passively but to sit with its stories, to taste their bitterness and sweetness, and perhaps to see your own history refracted in their light. With A Feast of Consequences, Fish delivers one of his most profound and cohesive statements - a record that lingers like weather, shaping the emotional landscape long after it has passed.
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My personal view:
This is the tenth solo studio album by progressive rock singer Fish, formerly the lead vocalist of Marillion. A stunning 23 years had passed since his excellent solo debut album Vigil in a wilderness of mirrors - and yet with this 2013 album, a delightful mixture of prog and bluesy rock, he managed to create his most consistently brilliant album, even better than that debut. The main attention point is the impressive 28 minutes anti-war suite The High Wood (tracks 5-9), but just as good are songs like Perfume River, Blind To The Beautiful, and The Other Side Of Me.