Pink Talking Fish nails the tricky Triple Tribute

The name of the band says it all: Pink Talking Fish is three tributes in one. The band re-creates the music of Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, and Phish. But not by playing one song at a time. This band’s hook is that they have figured out their chosen tune’s fault lines and used them as points of departure. They cut and paste. For example, instead of Talking Heads’ “Slippery People” all the way through, you get a version that starts out with a song by Phish called “Sand.” Or, Floyd’s “Time,” which is combined with “Ghost” by Phish and the T-Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” And it’s all really good. Pink Talking Fish nails each of the three bands they cover. I half expected to see flying pigs during their Floyd covers.

Pink Talking Fish is Eric Gould on bass, keyboardist/vocalist Richard James, drummer Zack Burwick, and Dave Brunyack on guitar. That’s a big job in this band, the guitar position, because Brunyack has to replicate a couple of guitar maestros in Trey Anastasio from Phish and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. The tribute gig is not forgiving. The audience has heard all of this before. They know the material cold, and they want comers for the tribute throne to play it right.

Eric Gould is the talking head of this band. He comes from the EDM band Particle. He launched Pink Talking Fish five years ago and calls what they do Hybrid Tribute Fusion. Gould told Huffpo that is was after he left Particle and swapped Los Angeles for Kansas City that the idea for Pink Talking Fish came to him. He’d been gigging with cover bands, and one thing led to another. Hybrid Tribute Fusion could end up being a slick career move. The music sounds the same, only different, right? One wonders how many younger fans not familiar with the original bands will detect Pink Talking Fish’s mix-and-match performance, or even care.