November 03, 2001

The fourth and final movie jam of the PacNW run, Run Lola Run, gets off to an unassuming start (much as 10/31 did), reminiscent of a Spectacle intro, or maybe a Eulogy. It settles into a gorgeous, mournful trance theme with Magner at the helm. The jam straddles beautiful and tense before reaching a crescendo around 7-8 minutes in and settling into a more tense theme. After a breakdown, the jam enters into an absolutely madcap passage. This builds to a terrifying, Shimmy-esque crescendo, which breaks down around the 18 minute mark into some digital-tinged dub. Pretty soon, this develops into a fantastic Run Like Hell intro. Even though it’s nearly ten minutes of a type one intro, there are still plenty of goodies here. Besides a botched drop into the middle, Run Like Hell is a stellar version. The main jam comfortably explores and expands the space between light and dark, and builds to an ending as strong as the song has ever seen. Astronaut is far from exploratory, but it is a satisfying groove-oriented theme that yields a strong peak. The outro jam gets kind of stuck in Astronaut territory, but check it out if you wanna hear a vaguely You & I sounding theme like 8 years before it debuted. The Lai gets into some groove jamming that yields a Barber theme that’s actually pretty interesting. This in turn yields to a strong full-band jam that leads into a great peak. Excellent Lai.

Shimmy opens set two, and is a fairly standard Shimmy jam, except it’s a little bit more blissful in the beginning, and by the 13 minute mark it’s slipped the bonds of Shimmy territory. Strong Crickets peak, but overall not a terribly interesting jam. Subverting expectations, the funk jam is actually fantastic. The band settles into a massive major key theme that builds to a powerful crescendo before breaking down almost completely and melting into Shelby Rose. The Shelby jam is the usual dark frenetic dnb. An absolutely sinister breakdown around 8:30 sees the jam return to Crickets funk territory with minimal energy lost. The jam out of Crickets has a sinister bent from pretty early on. There is some fantastic full-band interplay here, and this and the scorching peak section are enough to make up for the more uninteresting middle. The band chooses to break the palindrome, and outro Shimmy, and it yields a strong Shelby peak. The Tunnel closes out the set, and it’s another strong “type 1.5” version, continuing the trend from September. The Home Again encore is a standard version.

4/5. A notch under 11/2 and a notch over 11/1, this is probably the most consistent show of the four. The opening salvo is the undeniable highlight, but there are plenty of highlights in the “almost palindrome,” notably and surprisingly the Crickets funk > Shelby intro.

Stray Observations: After set break, Barber promotes the band on his T-Shirt, Big Frog.