Independent
Time To Fly is the final chapter in ten glorious years of this band’s legacy. As many of you will know, this is the final album recorded with Matt Long who lost his bravely fought battle with cancer. The mixing and arranging of the album has been done by Paul Long, pulling pieces of unfinished demos and half-written tunes, and turning them into an album that could not have been a better tribute to the career of Matt.
The album has a larger-than-life sound, something that Catfish had established from the get-go. The hard rockiness of Matt’s guitar playing and his vocals twinned with the Blues side of Paul, a perfect combination. Breaking Up Somebody’s Home has for many years been a constant song on the set list of the band, so it was decided to have a version of a live recording of the song, but stripped of background noise so that it sounds like it was recorded right there in the studio.
Two songs that Matt had demoed on his computer, Sick Of It All, and Say The Word, are, for me, the most intense and profoundly moving songs of Catfish history. The sheer emotion pouring through Matt’s guitar and vocals with the rest of the band bringing up the rear, is as close to perfection from a musical standpoint as you are ever likely to get. The final album from Catfish is the finest bunch of songs that they have ever produced in my opinion.
It will serve as a musical memorial for Matt, but overall, it will mark the band as a force of nature, a Blues/Rock powerhouse, something that we may never see the like of again.
STEPHEN HARRISON
