Reel Big Fish Fame, Fortune and Fornication

Reel Big Fish’s Fame, Fortune and Fornication is no Born to Run or Pet Sounds, it’s true, but so what? There’s nothing wrong with having a little fun, and I enjoy a good ska cover song as much as anybody, so I was kind of looking forward to an album full of what I was guessing (going by the cover, anyway) was ’80s cheese-metal done ska-punk-style.

I was a little bit off, in the end, but that’s probably a good thing. The cheesy hair-metal tracks on Fame, Fortune and Fornication — Poison’s “Nothin’ But a Good Time” and “Talk Dirty To Me” and Ratt’s “Mama We’re All Crazy Now” — work the least well, honestly, even though the bright, cheery ska horns smear together with the simplistic, primary-color party-hard songs. It’s almost too easy, really, too mindless; I’m thinking that’s why it doesn’t elicit more than a shrug.

Things get better, though. It turns out that both John (Cougar) Mellencamp’s “Authority Song” and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” work amazingly well here, coming off nearly like they’re the band’s own compositions — hell, I never would’ve guessed that “Brown Eyed Girl,” in particular, would sound so damn natural with low-key guitars and a gentle ska rhythm, but hell, there it is. Of course, there’re lightyears of difference, songwriting-wise, between “Mama We’re All Crazy Now” and Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down,” and it shows.

The surprise track of the album is The Eagles’ “The Long Run,” which in the hands of the Reel Big Fish guys is stripped of its California folk-rock clothing but not the sunshine-y feel, dropped down in the sun-soaked Caribbean like a long-lost Jimmy Cliff song. I’d apparently blocked the original from my memory, only going, “oh, yeah…” about halfway through. The song comes off more like a real-live Jamaican ska classic than the actual Toots and the Maytals and Desmond Dekker covers (which aren’t bad in themselves, mind you), and that’s no mean feat.

The best part of all of Fornication is that the band doesn’t treat it all as a big joke — no, not even the hair-metal tunes. Rather, they handle the songs with near-reverently and making it obvious that, despite the goofy faux-metal cover art, these are songs the members of Reel Big Fish really and truly love and adore. Which beats the heck out of somebody just screwing around and taking the piss, in my book.