By Paul Robicheau

It was a winding, ultimately exhilarating trip that spanned 51 songs, culminating on Sunday in a virtuosic clinic that sealed the quartet’s near-telepathic interplay across prog-leaning classics.

Trey Anastasio of Phish at Xfinity Center. Photo: Paul Robicheau

It’s an ambitious year for Phish. Going strong after four decades, the Vermont-bred jam kings became the second band to play Las Vegas’ beyond-IMAX Sphere with four April test drives, each offering both different songs and mind-bending visuals, synced in real time with improvisational flights. This month, Phish dropped a new album, Evolve, which typically settles for modest studio craftwork, promoting it hard, from an NPR Tiny Desk Concert to Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. And in August, the band that set the Bonnaroo blueprint with its all-Phish mid-’90s festivals will stage its biggest yet (and first in nine years given 2018’s flooding-scuttled Curveball) with Delaware’s four-day marathon Montegreen.

To grease the gears, Phish launched a summer tour of multi-night runs over the weekend at Mansfield’s Xfinity Center, the band’s first shows since Sphere and first local three-night stand since its late ’90s heyday at the Worcester Centrum (now DCU Center). It was a winding, ultimately exhilarating trip that spanned 51 songs, culminating on Sunday in a virtuosic clinic that sealed the quartet’s near-telepathic interplay across prog-leaning classics.

Jon Fishman of Phish at Xfinity Center. Photo by Paul Robicheau

Friday kicked off in the right direction. The first set lent interesting moments, with Trey Anastasio adding a surprisingly contemplative guitar solo to raveup “Character Zero” and fat, gooey chords to crushing blues-rocker “46 Days.” Jon Fishman’s laced thoughtful drum fills through a dreamy “Roggae,” and “Stash” dropped into echoey open space — a harbinger to a masterful second set of what fans call “evil Phish,” dripping in dark tones and deconstruction.

After opening the second set with toss-off oldie “Suzy Greenberg,” the group ramped up the tension with “Run Like an Antelope” as an escalating drag race. Bright lights and sound flashed into white noise that made a pinpoint landing impossible — if somewhat saved when Fishman bashed out an extra fill at the drop. Then Phish started from scratch in a methodical, exploratory 19-minute “Ghost.” Sudbury native Mike Gordon stomped a bass-pedal rumble from his expanded arsenal while Fishman tap-danced on snare under Anastasio’s taut chords and melodic fragments.

The set continued to flow through a surging “Light,” the proggy new “Pillow Jets” and floaty changeup “Beneath a Sea of Stars,” where Anastasio muffed the opening lyrics but he couldn’t lose by repeating “We’re all here together and the weather’s fine” to acknowledging cheers. But the cherry-on-top to the set’s deconstructions came in an elastic, dissonant “Split Open and Melt,” before encore “Harry Hood” placed guitar/bass counterpoint in a cozy green glow.

Without Sphere’s domed animations, Phish’s industry-leading lighting director Chris Kuroda matched the music with his towering grid of fog-coated cones and blinking, spinning bars (if overly bright for fans centered in the vortex), creating the illusions of stage-parting curtains and beam-framed pyramids.

Saturday turned from evil to happy Phish, as the band tapped into the energy of the party-hearty assembly. The first set found some footing in the crowd-pleasing country-rock bop “Get Back on the Train” and the playful rounds of “Bouncing Around the Room” (where an up-front fan shot clouds of bubbles into the air), leading Anastasio to trigger the old-friend nostalgia of “Backward Down the Number Line.” Gordon’s Evolve entry “Human Nature” made its live debut with an echo of the riff from the earlier-played “Sand,” but added a funk-pop feel in his catchy vocal tradeoff “Hey, yeah” and “Gotta get down to the get-go.” And in the reggae-tinged set closer “Drift While You’re Sleeping,” Anastasio brightly sang, “We dream and we struggle together, but love will carry us through.”

Newer material also  dominated Saturday’s second half. “Oblivion” evolved from a short instrumental tag to the vocal jam of set-launching classic “You Enjoy Myself” (which featured Anastasio and Gordon in their standard choreographed mini-trampoline hops), a rhythmically static ride continuing into the funkier “No Men in No Man’s Land.” Iced by Page McConnell’s clavinet chatter, that tune jammed harder out on a ping-ponging limb before dissolving into Evolve track “Monsters,” which Anastasio brought to a peak with a traditional guitar-hero solo in the vein of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” Then Phish’s signal for a dance party to the theme from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey erupted in waves of teasing, blasting lights to set up a welcome, rip-snorting “Chalkdust Torture,” with its cry “Can’t I live while I’m young?!” But the encore turned into a mixed bag with the knotty rush of composed standout “David Bowie” followed by the inane “Say it to Me S.A.N.T.O.S,” with its singalong lyrics “Heigh ho, heigh ho, heigh ho!” and “This is what space smells like.”

Mike Gordon of Phish at Xfinity Center (c) 2024 photo by Paul Robicheau

Ah, never miss a Sunday show. That’s the sage advice of Phish fans who feel the band brings extra payoffs to that waning weekend night, and it was certainly true in Mansfield. The entire group was sharp and balanced from the start, stringing a water theme through “Free,” “A Wave of Hope” and a scintillating “Bathtub Gin” that colored outside its sparse lines, Anastasio teasing the Grateful Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias” and Fishman weaving a whole-kit fill across one guitar figure. The song bobbed and flirted around the drummer’s fulcrum before it gave way to a rocking “Wilson,” another classic nailed as a crowd-chanting favorite that left band members smiling. Then rarities arrived: the light shuffle “The Connection” (played for only the sixth time since its 2004 recording) and “Thread,” a prog number whose off-kilter time yielded a few wonky steps, but served as a reminder that Phish is a band whose risks lead to greater rewards. After a pause, Anastasio and Gordon slid into a conversation of menacing guitar and bass tones that didn’t lead anywhere… but “Joy,” an overtly sweet if heartfelt ode to both daughters and Anastasio’s sister who died of cancer. It supplied an abrupt breather before a galloping “Runaway Jim” and the set-closing charge of “Life Saving Gun,” whose abstract refrain of “percussion rinse” led Fishman to oblige.

That was the last of seven tracks from Evolve spread through the weekend. Of course, they had more edge and range live than their sanitized studio versions. The recording’s most revelatory elements may be the string orchestrations that grace its album-capping tracks, the countrified “Valdese” and sway-worthy “Mercy.”

But Phish tackled the final, most convincing set of the weekend by way of an old-school tear. Unusual opener “The Squirming Coil” brought its Genesis-styled glide, McConnell’s piano coda setting up the signature riff of “Tweezer.” That revered warhorse is considered the group’s foremost jam vehicle, and it lived up to that billing with a 21-minute ride that proved to be texturally patient, never truly taking off beyond probing sonic branches that sprang from Anastasio’s guitar. More impressive were soaring, Anastasio-led jams out of a sculptural “Scents and Subtle Sounds” (guitar sustains sparking cheers before a shift to ZZ Top-like riffage) and “Twist,” where Gordon stepped into an edgy, plaintive bass lick that he repeated a few times while the others slid into support. A Fishman-sung romp through Talking Heads’ “Crosseyed and Painless” (only the second cover in Mansfield, the other being Los Lobos’ serene “When the Circus Comes”) shifted from firm control to climactic release in a jam that spurred on Kuroda’s intense wall of lights. Anastasio stopped to mull a follow-up, then surrendered to the majestic flow of “Slave to the Traffic Light” to end the second set before an encore punctuation of “Possum” and “Tweezer Reprise” closed the book.

Phish at Xfinity Center. Photo: Paul Robicheau.

Friday and Sunday arguably could rank not far behind Phish’s greatest shows in the Mansfield shed once known as Great Woods (where the band headlined its first big amphitheater concert in 1993). Among those would be 1994’s last full performance of Anastasio’s college fantasy suite “Gamehendge” — until the group rolled out a Broadway-styled staging this past New Year’s Eve at New York’s Madison Square Garden, jumpstarting a 2024 to remember for Phish.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.