September 29, 2001

This show is, comparatively speaking, heavy on the weak sauce. Most songs are on the short side, which is probably enough for most fans to feel let down. Where the band attempts a longer jam, it's largely forgettable, despite the effort. What looks cool on paper (7-11 vocal teases for example) is little more than a nice touch. You can find much worse shows than this no doubt, but you can also safely pass this one by.

Overture opens the show with some good old fashioned fall 2001 dnb. Magner lays down a synth pattern that instantly puts the listener on edge, and soon he and Barber begin to collaborate on a standard dnb theme. This reaches a crescendo around the 8 minute mark before breaking down into more spacey territory. That same uneasy synth line comes creeping back into the jam as it reaches its conclusion. A solid, unremarkable version. Lai has been fairly strong for the whole tour, and this version continues that legacy. The jam starts as a pleasant Lai groove, but begins to break down around the 6 minute mark. It rebuilds into a blissful vehicle, but shifts towards sinister territory around 9:30 as it heads towards Shimmy. Voices has a brief, fall 2000 style jam; it’s solid but short-lived. Ladies has a fist-pumping trance jam. Magner delivers an excellent, subdued theme, and Barber delivers patient, complementary riffs, and neither seems to be in the lead until around the 9 minute mark when Barber begins to build to the peak. Shimmy delivers the first truly interesting jam of the night, with a sinister trance jam quickly giving way to the evilest dub the band has ever pulled off. After some strong exploration, the jam breaks down completely around the 12 minute mark, and from here begins a fairly standard climb back into Lai.

Shem-Rah Boo isn’t very interesting to me. Magner is on piano for the entire jam, and it never gets that evil carnival trance vibe that so many of my favorite Shems have. Magellan is an odd version. They don’t really play a standard middle jam, but then the main jam begins with some reprisals of the middle riff. There is a short-lived percussive section before the jam becomes more standard. Solid, tense build and strong peak. The Waves jam is very fun. It hearkens back to the fall 99-00 dub style Waves. There is a very mellow, Magner-led theme followed by a breakdown, from which point the jam builds up to an energetic dub groove. The segue into M.E.M.P.H.I.S. is one of the smoothest ever. The main jam starts off strong, but loses my interest, and turns into the typical Barber shredfest. Excellent shredding, but not what I’m looking for. The outro jam takes some time to get moving, but after the 7-11 vocal teases it enters into a frenetic, dnb-adjacent passage. This builds to a thrilling Waves peak. Spectacle makes its first appearance since the spring tour, and is standard.

2/5. Most of the first set, minus an unconventional Shimmy jam, is pretty middling, but it earned points here and there for stronger-than-average Voices and Overture jams. The second set sandwich earned points for the jams out of and into Waves.

Stray Observations: Weird banter before set two. “Back to school” banter from Barber and some extended shushing before they thank their sound guy, Ollie. Brownie informs the crowd that Ollie is very good at Mario Kart, which he pronounces like a dad. There are 7-11 vocal teases in the M.E.M.P.H.I.S. outro. This show features the first Spectacle since 5/11/01, a gap of 36 shows. Barber sings “can’t fuck with time,” which rules.