Notes From The Drop Zone - 7/9/21

Last night’s show marked my first since the Frederick run (hardly a massive drought for sure), but it was also my first return to Philadelphia, my old home and favorite city, in two years. Nostalgia and other positive emotions were running high the whole day, and when the band opened with the Rocky Theme, I was delighted. No one ever goes into a Biscuits show hoping for a jamless standalone opener (especially a cover!) but this one will get replay from me purely for the nostalgia factor. There was a full pause before the band launched into Spaga. Spaga had some compositional flubs but was otherwise a solid version: the jam section was smooth, but also unremarkable. After Spaga ended, standalone, the band launched into a Run Like Hell segment that consumed the rest of the set. At the time, it felt massive, both in length and in quality. I said to a couple people that it felt like the best Run Like Hell intro/mid-verse in a while. It was pretty clearly a Run Like Hell intro from the start, but it was layered and expansive. The mid-verse jam was similarly longer than usual (or at least it seemed to be at the time). The jam out of Run Like Hell featured some brief Barber laptop action, which delighted me. The jam transitioned into Spacebird territory without losing any steam, and the band pulled off a strong transition. The Spacebird jam was fantastic, covering tremendous ground and multiple genres. It proceeded in a standard fashion for the first few minutes, but soon broke down into bluesy riffing and ambient space. From the space jamming, the band launched into the first ever set one Tractorbeam segment, a cover of Todd Terje. I was sure that the Terje tractorbeam segment (one of only two that I’m not big on) was coming this weekend, so getting it out of the way in the first set of the weekend was fine by me! On top of that, it produced an excellent ambient jam going into it and a strong Biscuits jam into a well-executed Spacebird ending on the way out.

The second set opened with Astronaut, and was jammed out of the SITA section. It took a while for the jam to lock in, and for the most part it was just a Barber shred-fest. However, it led into one of the most energetic and strongest overall transitions into Running that I’ve heard yet. The jam out of Running never settled down either. It was a short shred-fest until boom—Abyss. I will need to listen back to this, as I thought it appeared very suddenly and was overall not a fan at all. The jam out of Abyss, on the other hand, was fantastic. The vibe was pretty similar to an ordinary Abyss intro, and Barber even returned to the beep boops for a brief period, but left them behind shortly thereafter. The jam explored a lot of dark spaces before entering the familiar territory of Clocks. While a lot of the jam was in Clocks territory, it was hard to pinpoint exactly when the song began. This was easily the loosest the band has ever gotten with the Clocks composition, and I mean that in the best way. The jam out of Clocks was fantastic as well. The band chose to dunk on the haters and bless the faithful with a second Tractorbeam segment (this one, Eden, still ranks as my favorite). While I don’t think the jam got quite as deep or interesting as the South Carolina Sound 1 > Eden, it was still an easy highlight of the show. After the Tractorbeam jam, the band closed out with a SITA > Astronaut > Running that stayed mostly within the type one confines. Cool to get an Astronaut outro though.

For the encore, Brownie introduced Tom Hamilton. I was worried we would be treated to a boring Dead cover, but was pleasantly surprised by an encore-slot Humu (the first in over a decade). The jam took some time, but after the inverted Humu teases it found a really solid theme. The band built it up to a raging Run Like Hell end to close a solid show.

We still aren’t quite at the level of the October 2020 shows, but we’re doing a lot better now than the dismal state we were in the last time I saw the band. The two Tractorbeam segments was an interesting choice, one sure to piss off the knuckle-dragging multitudes, but one which resulted in some excellent jamming. I have high hopes for tonight. See you at the show.

Highlights:

Abyss > Clocks

Stretching and pushing the boundaries of the Clocks composition into strange new places. I like it.

Run Like Hell

The intro and the mid-verse jam are hard to separate in my mind, and provide probably the best example of mid-tempo 4x4 that we heard last night.

Spacebird > Strandbar

Excellent stuff. Standard Spacebird themes break down into unconventional blues jamming and finally dissolve into ambient soundscape.

Clocks > Eden

How much of this is jam and how much is composed? Since it’s my first time seeing Eden, I don’t really care. If this is the new direction of the Biscuits sound, I am so here for it.

Stray Observations:

This is the first Clocks with an outro jam since the second one, 5/24/19.

This is the first Humu encore since 6/9/10 at Windjammer.

THANK YOU FOR BRINGING BACK THE ABLETON JAMS.

PLEASE BRING BACK REGULARLY RELEASED SOUNDBOARD RECORDINGS.

OK THANKS B4L.

—Mr. Zan