Scott's Spotlight #43: Beardfish
Originally posted to Facebook on Sept 5, 2025
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It’s time, once again, to return to Scandinavia, where there must be something in the melted glacier water they drink that creates great prog musicians! Today, I am putting Swedish proggers Beardfish in the spotlight.
The band came together in 2001 when founding, and constant members Rikard Sjöblom (guitar/keys/vocals) and David Zackrisson (guitar) along with Gabriel Olsson (Bass) and Petter Diamant (Drums) began playing together. Sjöblom and Zackrisson had previously played together in a grunge band called Wooderson. However there were a few early line-up changes. By the end of 2001, Magnus Östgren had taken over the drum throne from Diamant. In early 2002, keyboardist Stefan Aronsson made Beardfish a five-piece line-up. Later in 2002, Robert Hansen took over the bass from Olsson.
This five-man line-up would record Beardfish’s first album, “Från En Plats Du Ej Kan Se” (Swedish for “From a Place You Can't See”), released in 2003. Interestingly, the album is partly sung in English, and partly in Swedish. The language in which the title appears is the giveaway. The opening title track, track 3 “Spegeldans” (translation: “Mirror Dance”), and track 7, “Om En Utväg Fanns” (“If There Was a Way Out”) are in Swedish, while the other 5 are in English. The album closes with a 15 minute epic entitled “A Psychic Amplifier”. Regardless of the language, this is fantastic prog. I am listening to “Poison Ivy and The Full Monty” and loving some of the pure querkiness near the ending portion of the song. The band shows the influence of classic prog bands like Yes and Genesis, along with their own style. The album was initially released on an independent label called “Jet-Set Records”, and later re-issued in 2007 with a couple of bonus tracks on a label called “Progress Records”.
By the time of the second album, 2005’s “The Sane Day”, Aronsson had departed the band, making Beardfish a quartet once again. This line-up remains constant to this day. This album appears to have been self-released in 2005, and also re-issued in 2007 on Progress Records. This is a very ambitious double CD/concept album, with several of the tracks being instrumentals only. The full album runs to nearly 2 hours in length. This album and all subsequent ones use only English lyrics. The basic outline of the story is that it is about a guy who goes into isolation after breaking up with him, leaves his hometown of “Mudhill” to go to another town called “Gooberville” and eventually returns to “Mudhill”. The lyrics and style take many cues from Frank Zappa in its absurdist humor. I have enjoyed several tracks on the album, including the opening epic of nearly 13 minutes, called “A Love Story”, “Tall Tales” and “Ask Someone Who Knows”.
In 2006, Beardfish were signed to the well-known prog label “Inside Out”, on which they remain. Their third album was released in 2007 and called “Sleeping in Traffic, Pt. 1”. Which was obviously followed up in 2008 with (you guessed it) “Sleeping in Traffic, Pt. 2”. The overarching concept of this pair of albums is 24 hours in an individual person’s day, with part one being the daytime and part 2 being night-time. The two volumes run to a total of approximately 2 hours and 20 minutes, but by breaking the two parts into separate albums, it made it easier to digest for some listeners, perhaps. Pt. 1 contains “Sunrise” which I have enjoyed. It closes with the track “Same old Song (Sunset)”. Pt. 2 begins with “As the Sun Sets” and closes with “Sunrise Again”. However it is the penultimate track of the set that may be the crown jewel in Beardfish’s catalog, the title track “Sleeping in Traffic” which runs to over 35 minutes and never gets boring!
Album #5 for Beardfish is “Destined Solitaire” released in 2009. While there does not appear to be a specific concept tying the songs together, this album is often compared favorably with its 2-part predecessor in terms of quality. It seems that many consider it to be their best one. The album contains six songs out of nine that are longer than 8 minutes, with three of those longer than 10 minutes: the title track (10:53), “Until you Comply (Including Entropy)” (15:21) and “The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of” (10:40), which is the one I am most familiar with on the album.
2011 saw the release of album number six for Beardfish, titled “Mammoth”.As with its predecessor, it is not a concept album. While well received, it does not seem to get quite the same level of acclaim as the previous 3 releases. That said, the quality is still quite high! The epics are still there, with 3 songs in the 8 - 9 minute range: “The Platform” (8:06), “Green Waves” (8:53) and “Without Saying Anything (feat. Ventriloquist)” Additionally there is a 15 minute epic called “And the Stone Said: If I Could Speak”. There was a standard edition as well as a deluxe edition with a bonus DVD including a live concert and a “Making of” documentary.
The following year (2012) they released “The Void”, an album on which they chose to pursue a heavier direction on some songs, influenced by grunge bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, along with their Swedish countrymen, prog-metal legends Opeth. There is even a bit of growling vocals on the album. According to Rikard Sjöblom:
“The title refers to an emotional void based upon loss,” Sjöblom reveals. “A lot of tough stuff happened to me that I don’t really want to go into in an interview, but it left me in a very low state. The album’s main character is trying to get away from that emotional darkness. The album makes some depressing statements about
war and what people are doing to each other.”
The album contains a nearly 16 minute long epic called “Note”. Additionally, there are 4 tracks that fall into the range of seven to (just over) eight minutes long. “Volunteer Slavery”, preceded by “Intro” (By Andy Tillison of The Tangent), is one of the songs with a very brief amount of growling vocals. The album closes with Beardfish getting a little bluesy on “Where the Lights are Low”.
Beardfish’s eighth album was released in 2015 and titled “+4626-COMFORTZONE”. The first portion of the title is a reference to the international calling code used to reach the area of their hometown in Sweden. The album was originally set to be called simply “Comfort Zone”, but they thought that adding the calling code would make it more personal. This is the Beardfish album that I am least familiar with, as it was inexplicably not in my Apple Music library until now. However, a quick glance at the album’s song titles tells me that there is a reference back to 2005’s “The Sane Day” in the song “If We Must Be Apart” (A Love Story Continued)”. That song is also the major epic at 15:34. Additionally, there are three segments of a song called “The One Inside”, with Part 1 opening the album and subtitled “Noise in the Background”, Part 2 in the middle of the album and subtitled “My Companion Throughout Life”, and Part 3 closing the album and subtitled “Relief”.
In 2016, however, there was “an interesting turn of events”, to borrow the title of a Dream Theater album from a few years earlier. Beardfish broke up over “internal disagreements and various difficulties within the band”. Band members also expressed that family and personal responsibilities played a part in the decision. According to Rikard Sjöblom:
“We understand each other very well, all the great things about each other, and all the faults! But yeah, it became impossible to continue with all four of us in the band, and we didn’t want to sack anyone. So we just said, ‘OK, if it’s not the four of us, it’s not going to work.’”
The members of Beardfish all kept busy after the breakup in various musical projects. Rikard Sjöblom had become a touring member of Big Big Train (see my spotlight on them, linked below) in 2014, and became a full-time member of that band in 2015. Additionally, he had begun a solo career in 2009 under the name of Gungfly which had released two albums in 2009 and 2011 respectively. He would continue that project with three more albums coming in 2017, 2018 and 2020. Meanwhile, Magnus Östgren played drums with various local bands. David Zackrisson, according to Sjöblom, had played with “an indie/hardcore outfit for a while”, and appears to also have been busy working with some Swedish bands in the studio as an engineer and/or in mixing their albums. Finally, according to Sjöblom, Robert Hansen:
played in all kinds of different blues bands, and he and I did a tribute thing to this Dutch guy called Cornelis Vreeswijk. He was like a Swedish troubadour and he was pretty funky in the 70s! We did a tribute to him that we played for a while.
After a few years, the band began to work out their issues with one another and started quietly drifting back together. In 2021, they decided to have a rehearsal and see if the magic was still there. According to Sjöblom:
“We’d been hanging out a little bit. Not all four of us in the same room, but we’d been meeting up, listening to records or having a beer,” says frontman Rikard Sjöblom. “But this was the first time all of us were in a room, wanting to make music together. That was really cool. We started by playing an old song – Without Saying Anything from Mammoth – and it was basically a case of all the hairs standing up on your arm, that kind of feeling. I felt straight away that we were back; it felt like no time had passed.”
Despite the auspicious feeling at that rehearsal, Beardfish decided to keep their impending reunion quiet until they had an album put together. And what an album it is! “Songs for Beating Hearts” was released in November of 2024, and picks right up where they’d left off nearly a decade earlier. The album features a 20 minute epic (although it is unfortunately split into 5 tracks on the version of the album that I have) called “Out in the Open”. Furthermore, I have enjoyed the other two longer songs on the album: “Beating Hearts” (11:01), and “Torrential Downpour” (8:30). For more info on the songs on this album, I highly recommend reading the following article (from which several of the quotes I have used came): https://www.loudersound.com/features/beardfish-songs-for-beating-hearts .
So, prog fans rejoice, as Beardfish is back! While they are definitely fond of the extended prog epic, ProgArchives correctly identifies them as eclectic prog. They roll their diverse influences into one fantastic cohesive sound. Check out the “Links for Listening” below to check them out for yourself!
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Prog On!
Scott
LINKS FOR LISTENING (And a related article):
From
“Från En Plats Du Ej Kan Se”
“Spegeldans”:
https://youtu.be/X300xC0Q6UM
“Poison Ivy and the Full Monty”
https://youtu.be/AWn3T-Yt3Cw
From “The Sane Day”
“A Love Story”
https://youtu.be/BybZWXTAgqU
“The Gooberville Ballroom Dancer”
https://youtu.be/UrtPqAryKSM
From “Sleeping In Traffic Pt. 1”
“Sunrise”
https://youtu.be/DJe9MylAD1s
“Same Old Song (Sunset)”
https://youtu.be/h50lCN3OlXE
From Sleeping In Traffic Pt. 2”
“The Hunter”
https://youtu.be/o8ar1MOIvUY
“Sleeping in Traffic”
https://youtu.be/m42tOTK19BQ
From “Destined Solitaire”
“Destined Solitaire”
https://youtu.be/5u-H_8Uvae0
“The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of”
https://youtu.be/PrfwNIhpFvw
From “Mammoth”
“The Platform”
https://youtu.be/bu8OthAEtuI
“Green Waves”
https://youtu.be/WZVRjFPv9p4
From “The Void”
“Intro”/”Voluntary Slavery”
https://youtu.be/x-az9REyxG8
“Note”
https://youtu.be/YEfu4T23zKM
From “+4626 COMFORTZONE”
“Comfort Zone”
https://youtu.be/C-U3WKmuOII
“If We Must Be Apart (A Love Story Continued)”
https://youtu.be/221TZrvYli8
From “Songs for Beating Hearts”
“Beating Hearts”
https://youtu.be/YF6ELoqV_Ao
“Torrential Downpour” (Official Video)
https://youtu.be/ptqdsiPJduM
Related Article:
Big Big Train Spotlight:
https://scottssongbysongandspotlights.blogspot.com/2025/08/scotts-spotlight-40-big-big-train.html
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