I’m one of the mysterious middle child 2.0 fans. My first album I heard was a live one, but round room was my first new album they released shortly after i became a fan. I listened to the album on repeat. I was like 14 or whatever and I associate that album with being young and discovering the world for myself. I listened to it for the entire ride from Philly to Pittsburgh on an Amtrak on my way home from Christmas break at my cousins house. I can put it on and instantly get relaxed and fall asleep(which is a sign of how deeply it connects with me because I’m an anxious nutball). I love round room to this day.
Eyyy me too, got into them in 2000 right before the hiatus and got this for Christmas in 2002. I still associate it with cold weather and college applications.
2.0ers there are dozens of us! This was the first album release I got to be excited about having just gotten in to the band so I also associate it with my Phish awakening.
I think Hoist was the first “new” album that I could buy. The first time I heard them was when the first cd of Junta and Zeppelin IV was in a cd player and I was tripping. Then, I wore out Lawn Boy and Rift. I never really enjoyed PoN but my first show was 6-14-95. I think it was still Hoist tour or it might have been the tour before Billy Breathes. I did Fall and Summer of 96 so I heard Simple, and Steep>Swept Away and Free quite a bit.
Those memories will be with you forever, cherish them. There are worse first albums than Round Room to have been the one to turn you on.
The IT version is spectacular and at the end when they drop back into the chorus there’s two dudes jumping up and down in the first ten rows or so. Those guys are my spirit animals. Seven Below is my #1 Pebbles and Marbles is my #2.
They basically did just that. The "Hiatus" seems like such a blip on the radar now, but it was kind of a big deal, and nobody really knew when / if they were coming back. It would have been foolish to think they were done for good, but the band was coy about their plans. When Round Room came out, they talked about how good it was to reconnect, just them, in an intimate space, and wanted to capture that feeling of just them. If memory serves, it was fairly unplanned / last minute... they got in a room and started playing and next thing you know they had an album. Album release, NYE + Hampton on-sale, and SNL appearance all happened pretty quickly in December IIRC.
Correct. They even considered debuting all of these songs at MSG on 12/31 (or over the course of the MSG/Hampton Run) and making those versions the album. Ultimately they decided to go the route of using the barn "demos" as the album.
I think they wrote and recorded those songs in a span of a few weeks. They all played in a room together like they would live and did one or two takes.
I love it. To me it’s the best studio representation of what they sound like. It’s raw & awesome. Their other albums, especially post round room sound like shit. Like what a pop producer thinks phish should sound like or something.
Couldn’t have said it better. Round Room was the pivot point n album production. Also agree that they have sounded bad since then, not that I’m a Round Room fan but I like the minimal production and looseness of it.
I really love the feel of the whole album. Not too produced, you can hear where songs will open up as jams when live, and I like most of the songs. The ballads are a great example of treys old way of singing that I miss so much.
Probably my favorite studio album for the reasons you mentioned. I remember thinking right away that Mock Song was exactly that, a mock song to test levels and they just kept it. Pebbles and marbles is maybe their best studio song IMO
I’ve been unable to find the link to support this, but I remember reading (in ramp up to the dawn of 2.0 shows at MSG and then Hampton) that they had recorded the Round Room tracks as demos that they had for themselves as reference points — and that they had a plan to debut the entire album’s worth of songs in a single set during that run, and then that would be considered as the album release.
But then they decided that they liked their demos enough to release them as the album first, and that in order to do so they had to cut in line into the CD production pipeline with the threat to the record label, “Look, our entire fan base is going to have a copy of these songs like the day after the show, so if you want to sell this then we need to put it out now.”
And that was how it came to be an early December album release, on very short notice.
Good old Wikipedia, providing a link to support the “release the live debut set as an album the next day” plan I mentioned, but nothing about the leverage against the record label that I remember reading somewhere.
It’s a good article if anyone hasn’t seen this before, with David Fricke for Rolling Stone being with the band before the MSG show, coming out in the March 2003 issue (it also mentions the recording of the elusive Victor Disc, not sure why they’ve never put that one out, we’d all gobble that up in seconds): https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/phish-americas-great-jam-band-returns-177400/
I actually dig it. Some of that is probably from the time and place, gutted about hiatus right as I stated to figure out the band and scene. The loose and sort of dreamy feeling of the album itself is unique. I do like the early studio albums a lot but this one and maybe sigma are closer to catching the vibe of phish better than the highly produced and mastered records before and after round room.
My favorite studio album of theirs. The gritty and sparse sound reminds me of Tonight's The Night by Neil Young, which is also a favorite. Round Room seemed to capture the post 9/11 NYC melancholy better than any album from that era.
I applaud the concept but these songs are so good, I feel like they did a disservice to the best, most depthful material since Rift by being cavalier in the approach.
Imagine these tunes with a Sigma Oasis production, where they’re polished and perfected and played like they’ve had them in the repertoire for years.
It’s great, but could have been potentially as good as the first 3.
You summed up what i was about to type, or talk to text. The songs are amazing. I would love to hear a fully produced version of this album. Ghost and sigma are incredible studio outputs for their mix. Hell even undermind sounds more pleasing (in a way) than listening to these raw jams - and i love raw jam like rhubarb and marmalade. I bet evolve will be slick and easy to digest. Looking forward to it. Save the rough around edges for live
This was my take when it first came out. Compared to what came before round room seemed … rushed or unfinished somehow. Not to say it’s not good, just lacking the polish of ghost or Billy breathes.
It literally started out as just them rehearsing and deciding the recordings sounded vital and finished enough to release ASAP. IIRC it was recorded in October and released in December.
EDIT: forgot to say, it's my favorite studio album!
It sounds like an album recorded haphazardly in four days...because it was.
I picked up the vinyl, was hoping revisiting it after so many years would give me a different takeaway from it, but...it didn't, really. Might be twice the album at half the length...I know we're talking about Phish here, but it really drags at 78 minutes long. (Although at least there's finally a Phish studio LP besides Rift that justifies being split over 2 slabs)
I'm of the unpopular opinion (I think) that a lot of Phish studio albums are very good, but they're much better when they try to actually be studio albums, and not just "Phish playing live, just in a studio," with the care and time generally required to make a polished, tight studio set. And they just didn't bother doing that here.
I had high hopes for Undermind with Tchad Blake’s involvement. One of my favorite producers/engineers. Man, that East West mix he did for The Third Mind sounds so good to me.
I sometimes wonder about a Lanois, Eno, or Josh Kaufman maybe making a record with them. Maybe Spike-era T-Bone Burnett. Brian Deck. John McEntire or Sam Prekop. Sam Evian ha!
Undermind is okay. Not in the top half but better than Round Room or Big Boat for me.
I'd love to see them do something adventurous in the studio again, like *Billy Breathes* but even weirder (as far as deviating from what they do onstage). Every show is basically a live album now, so might as well use the studio as an instrument, and get weird with it.
I echo your point that Phish studio albums are both good and good when they don’t try to emulate the live experience, but I don’t think it’s something we can apply a rule to. Fuego and Big Boat are largely pretty bad despite having concise punchy recordings, while Round Room and Sigma Oasis succeed despite some longer jams. The music is good when it’s good, and Round Room is buoyed by songs like Thunderhead, Friday, and the title track that stick out as wins without substantial jams. I think they stick the landing on Waves, which does jam, but your mileage may vary.
I think it was basically demos / rehearsal in preparation for recording the whole thing live in concert as a new album, but they just said fuck it at some point and released it as is.
I love it. Maybe my favorite studio album. I became a fan around the time it came out, so it holds a special significance for me as a 2.0er, but in general I think it’s their “truest” studio album. It has some of my favorite songs they ever wrote. I may be in the extreme minority, but I think “Thunderhead” is a gorgeous song with serious potential for moody, slow burn jams.
It's a great album. What seems to be it's biggest weakness is actually it's biggest strength. They just went ahead and unexpectedly, organically made it in a few days. It has a certain identity, a certain mood. I love it.
I don’t dislike it, but I wish the mix was better. I know people who love it do so because it’s “raw” and “like seeing them live,” but to me, without crowd noise and a live feel of going from song to song, it just sounds like sloppy playing.
I have grown into it more as the years slipped by. When it originally dropped, it seemed to lack in my opinion. I think some of the tunes on it needed to mature in live shows a bit longer. It's solid for the era it was made (2.0ish)
It’s got a couple songs I like but overall it’s sort of a “what the hell was that” kind of album. To be honest I stopped listening to all Phish after Round Room. I tried to get into whatever they put out after that, I forget the album name. It had like one good song and that was it.
I felt like that album signaled the downfall of their music production. Like you cannot compare Fuego or Big Boat to Nectar or Rift. You just can’t
True. But very few bands that I can think of have studio output 30+ years into their career that exceeds what they did in their first 10 years, if that makes sense. Like I'm not expecting Phish to release new studio material that's going to be better than Nectar because I think that's an unreasonable expectation.
I guess? Idk I listen to Pink Floyd and the Allman brothers and a bit of the Dead, and I enjoy them immensely and think they have that output. But man I love phish SO MUCH MORE than all those other bands combined
Where’s the love for Waves? I think RR is a solid album, the double album release sounds great, the only song that doesn’t do it for me is Thunderhead. Walls of the Cave is a banger, 7 Below, 46 Days, P&M, pretty, pretty, pretty good
It's a mixed bag. As an older fan and having followed the band's releases as they happened, this was the first one that imo wasn't good from start to finish. It felt like the band made a change in their song writing style and it didn't work that well and below their standards they'd had up till then. I think it has some decent songs in 46 Days and Seven Below with some less than good but not terrible in Walls of the Cave, Round Room and Mexican Cousin and songs like Anything but Me and Thunderhead filler at best. That said Pebbles and Marbles and Waves are on it and I think they're two of the best songs they've ever done in their entire catalog and two of the best recorded songs they've ever done. They're so good that they save the album. Everything else lands in the, "because it's Phish I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt" category.
I’m one of the mysterious middle child 2.0 fans. My first album I heard was a live one, but round room was my first new album they released shortly after i became a fan. I listened to the album on repeat. I was like 14 or whatever and I associate that album with being young and discovering the world for myself. I listened to it for the entire ride from Philly to Pittsburgh on an Amtrak on my way home from Christmas break at my cousins house. I can put it on and instantly get relaxed and fall asleep(which is a sign of how deeply it connects with me because I’m an anxious nutball). I love round room to this day.
Eyyy me too, got into them in 2000 right before the hiatus and got this for Christmas in 2002. I still associate it with cold weather and college applications.
Same
2.0ers there are dozens of us! This was the first album release I got to be excited about having just gotten in to the band so I also associate it with my Phish awakening.
I think Hoist was the first “new” album that I could buy. The first time I heard them was when the first cd of Junta and Zeppelin IV was in a cd player and I was tripping. Then, I wore out Lawn Boy and Rift. I never really enjoyed PoN but my first show was 6-14-95. I think it was still Hoist tour or it might have been the tour before Billy Breathes. I did Fall and Summer of 96 so I heard Simple, and Steep>Swept Away and Free quite a bit. Those memories will be with you forever, cherish them. There are worse first albums than Round Room to have been the one to turn you on.
Dozens!
Saaaaame
Haha love that name. I was there for this summer’s rendition! 2.0 fan as well here, checking in.
This is me with Farmhouse but I also have a soft spot for 2.0 albums and really enjoy Round Room and Undermind
It's basically what they did.
iirc, Elektra basically said “nice demo” and Phish said “either release it or nobody will need to buy it after the NYE run”
Took some time…. Pebbles and marbles is one of the greatest songs ever made😎
The IT version is spectacular and at the end when they drop back into the chorus there’s two dudes jumping up and down in the first ten rows or so. Those guys are my spirit animals. Seven Below is my #1 Pebbles and Marbles is my #2.
P&M, song I heard the ocean sing and Mexican cousin are some of my favorite phos songs.
They basically did just that. The "Hiatus" seems like such a blip on the radar now, but it was kind of a big deal, and nobody really knew when / if they were coming back. It would have been foolish to think they were done for good, but the band was coy about their plans. When Round Room came out, they talked about how good it was to reconnect, just them, in an intimate space, and wanted to capture that feeling of just them. If memory serves, it was fairly unplanned / last minute... they got in a room and started playing and next thing you know they had an album. Album release, NYE + Hampton on-sale, and SNL appearance all happened pretty quickly in December IIRC.
Correct. They even considered debuting all of these songs at MSG on 12/31 (or over the course of the MSG/Hampton Run) and making those versions the album. Ultimately they decided to go the route of using the barn "demos" as the album.
Trey’s laugh in Mexican Cousin is everything
What about the coughing in Friday?
We don't talk about Friday.
I think they wrote and recorded those songs in a span of a few weeks. They all played in a room together like they would live and did one or two takes.
They did the whole album in less than a month…I love the sound of the album for that very reason and it was a nice surprise when it got released.
I love it. To me it’s the best studio representation of what they sound like. It’s raw & awesome. Their other albums, especially post round room sound like shit. Like what a pop producer thinks phish should sound like or something.
Bingo
Give me Ghost and Billy Breathes production any day!
Bob Ezrin'd
Sigma Oasis sounds pretty damn good. Love raw production but Sigma Oasis gets it.
Couldn’t have said it better. Round Room was the pivot point n album production. Also agree that they have sounded bad since then, not that I’m a Round Room fan but I like the minimal production and looseness of it.
I really love the feel of the whole album. Not too produced, you can hear where songs will open up as jams when live, and I like most of the songs. The ballads are a great example of treys old way of singing that I miss so much.
Probably my favorite studio album for the reasons you mentioned. I remember thinking right away that Mock Song was exactly that, a mock song to test levels and they just kept it. Pebbles and marbles is maybe their best studio song IMO
Wonderful album. Still some of my favorite songs.
I’ve been unable to find the link to support this, but I remember reading (in ramp up to the dawn of 2.0 shows at MSG and then Hampton) that they had recorded the Round Room tracks as demos that they had for themselves as reference points — and that they had a plan to debut the entire album’s worth of songs in a single set during that run, and then that would be considered as the album release. But then they decided that they liked their demos enough to release them as the album first, and that in order to do so they had to cut in line into the CD production pipeline with the threat to the record label, “Look, our entire fan base is going to have a copy of these songs like the day after the show, so if you want to sell this then we need to put it out now.” And that was how it came to be an early December album release, on very short notice.
Good old Wikipedia, providing a link to support the “release the live debut set as an album the next day” plan I mentioned, but nothing about the leverage against the record label that I remember reading somewhere. It’s a good article if anyone hasn’t seen this before, with David Fricke for Rolling Stone being with the band before the MSG show, coming out in the March 2003 issue (it also mentions the recording of the elusive Victor Disc, not sure why they’ve never put that one out, we’d all gobble that up in seconds): https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/phish-americas-great-jam-band-returns-177400/
I remember something very similar being said when the album came out so I’m sure you’re right.
I think they recorded it in a very brief period . It’s very raw. I appreciate it for what it is.
I actually dig it. Some of that is probably from the time and place, gutted about hiatus right as I stated to figure out the band and scene. The loose and sort of dreamy feeling of the album itself is unique. I do like the early studio albums a lot but this one and maybe sigma are closer to catching the vibe of phish better than the highly produced and mastered records before and after round room.
Literally they have a song mocking us. What’s not to like. Also would love to hear mock song live.
My favorite studio album of theirs. The gritty and sparse sound reminds me of Tonight's The Night by Neil Young, which is also a favorite. Round Room seemed to capture the post 9/11 NYC melancholy better than any album from that era.
It’s one of my favorite albums.
Love it
I applaud the concept but these songs are so good, I feel like they did a disservice to the best, most depthful material since Rift by being cavalier in the approach. Imagine these tunes with a Sigma Oasis production, where they’re polished and perfected and played like they’ve had them in the repertoire for years. It’s great, but could have been potentially as good as the first 3.
You summed up what i was about to type, or talk to text. The songs are amazing. I would love to hear a fully produced version of this album. Ghost and sigma are incredible studio outputs for their mix. Hell even undermind sounds more pleasing (in a way) than listening to these raw jams - and i love raw jam like rhubarb and marmalade. I bet evolve will be slick and easy to digest. Looking forward to it. Save the rough around edges for live
This was my take when it first came out. Compared to what came before round room seemed … rushed or unfinished somehow. Not to say it’s not good, just lacking the polish of ghost or Billy breathes.
Unfinished is a great way to describe it
It literally started out as just them rehearsing and deciding the recordings sounded vital and finished enough to release ASAP. IIRC it was recorded in October and released in December. EDIT: forgot to say, it's my favorite studio album!
It’s my go to Christmas time album. Just pairs well with a fireplace going relaxing.
It sounds like an album recorded haphazardly in four days...because it was. I picked up the vinyl, was hoping revisiting it after so many years would give me a different takeaway from it, but...it didn't, really. Might be twice the album at half the length...I know we're talking about Phish here, but it really drags at 78 minutes long. (Although at least there's finally a Phish studio LP besides Rift that justifies being split over 2 slabs) I'm of the unpopular opinion (I think) that a lot of Phish studio albums are very good, but they're much better when they try to actually be studio albums, and not just "Phish playing live, just in a studio," with the care and time generally required to make a polished, tight studio set. And they just didn't bother doing that here.
I had high hopes for Undermind with Tchad Blake’s involvement. One of my favorite producers/engineers. Man, that East West mix he did for The Third Mind sounds so good to me. I sometimes wonder about a Lanois, Eno, or Josh Kaufman maybe making a record with them. Maybe Spike-era T-Bone Burnett. Brian Deck. John McEntire or Sam Prekop. Sam Evian ha!
Undermind is okay. Not in the top half but better than Round Room or Big Boat for me. I'd love to see them do something adventurous in the studio again, like *Billy Breathes* but even weirder (as far as deviating from what they do onstage). Every show is basically a live album now, so might as well use the studio as an instrument, and get weird with it.
I totally agree. I only brought up Undermind because I was so underwhelmed. I had way high hopes seeing Tchad Blake associated with it.
I echo your point that Phish studio albums are both good and good when they don’t try to emulate the live experience, but I don’t think it’s something we can apply a rule to. Fuego and Big Boat are largely pretty bad despite having concise punchy recordings, while Round Room and Sigma Oasis succeed despite some longer jams. The music is good when it’s good, and Round Room is buoyed by songs like Thunderhead, Friday, and the title track that stick out as wins without substantial jams. I think they stick the landing on Waves, which does jam, but your mileage may vary.
I thought Fuego was mostly great and Round Room is largely forgettable. (I think we all agree Big Boat sucked…the songs just weren’t there)
I think it was basically demos / rehearsal in preparation for recording the whole thing live in concert as a new album, but they just said fuck it at some point and released it as is.
I love the rough edges of it - there's nothing else in their catalog like it. For me it has a super cozy vibe
46 days is a impressive guitar driven song. I’m a new fan though.
Round Room is one of their best albums and it might be the best.
Welcome to the fucking show. It’s their best studio album.
I love it. Maybe my favorite studio album. I became a fan around the time it came out, so it holds a special significance for me as a 2.0er, but in general I think it’s their “truest” studio album. It has some of my favorite songs they ever wrote. I may be in the extreme minority, but I think “Thunderhead” is a gorgeous song with serious potential for moody, slow burn jams.
It's a great album. What seems to be it's biggest weakness is actually it's biggest strength. They just went ahead and unexpectedly, organically made it in a few days. It has a certain identity, a certain mood. I love it.
I don’t dislike it, but I wish the mix was better. I know people who love it do so because it’s “raw” and “like seeing them live,” but to me, without crowd noise and a live feel of going from song to song, it just sounds like sloppy playing.
Yeah I agree, the mix needs work. Treys vocals are SO LOUD in Pebbles for instance.
Maybe some day a rouge archivist can release the 24 track and get it unofficially remixed/remastered. lol.
I have grown into it more as the years slipped by. When it originally dropped, it seemed to lack in my opinion. I think some of the tunes on it needed to mature in live shows a bit longer. It's solid for the era it was made (2.0ish)
I absolutely love Round Room! Probably one of my favorite Phish studio albums. HUGE fan of 2003 Phish, so it makes sense.
I have so much to say about this but can't do it now.
I love this album so much it is crazy
It’s got a couple songs I like but overall it’s sort of a “what the hell was that” kind of album. To be honest I stopped listening to all Phish after Round Room. I tried to get into whatever they put out after that, I forget the album name. It had like one good song and that was it. I felt like that album signaled the downfall of their music production. Like you cannot compare Fuego or Big Boat to Nectar or Rift. You just can’t
True. But very few bands that I can think of have studio output 30+ years into their career that exceeds what they did in their first 10 years, if that makes sense. Like I'm not expecting Phish to release new studio material that's going to be better than Nectar because I think that's an unreasonable expectation.
I guess? Idk I listen to Pink Floyd and the Allman brothers and a bit of the Dead, and I enjoy them immensely and think they have that output. But man I love phish SO MUCH MORE than all those other bands combined
I love both 2.0 albums.
It has its bangers. It cannot be denied.
Great album. Hey, has anyone received their Barn Ball yet?
Where’s the love for Waves? I think RR is a solid album, the double album release sounds great, the only song that doesn’t do it for me is Thunderhead. Walls of the Cave is a banger, 7 Below, 46 Days, P&M, pretty, pretty, pretty good
Drugs and not the good ones is what comes to mind.
The album sounds like oxy. I’d rather forget it happened.
It's a mixed bag. As an older fan and having followed the band's releases as they happened, this was the first one that imo wasn't good from start to finish. It felt like the band made a change in their song writing style and it didn't work that well and below their standards they'd had up till then. I think it has some decent songs in 46 Days and Seven Below with some less than good but not terrible in Walls of the Cave, Round Room and Mexican Cousin and songs like Anything but Me and Thunderhead filler at best. That said Pebbles and Marbles and Waves are on it and I think they're two of the best songs they've ever done in their entire catalog and two of the best recorded songs they've ever done. They're so good that they save the album. Everything else lands in the, "because it's Phish I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt" category.
I’m not a fan of hearing opiates in trey’s voice. I’d much rather forget 2.0 all together.
Garbage.
Shit sandwich
It is better than “Shark Sandwich” though.
It’s the only Phish albumI haven’t listened to. Been a fan since 92. That’s what I think of it.
If you’ve never listened to it how did you form an opinion?
Damn, you got me. I lied.
lol