February 25, 2006

Commercial Amen is standard. The first Jigsaw jam starts around the 6-minute mark and goes to around the 9-minute mark. I actually think they have some good stuff going here, but they just cut this way too short to make this notable or worth relistening. The second Jigsaw jam has some really neat stuff in it. The first portion of this is a high-intensity, straight-up trance assault. This is complete with weird sounds from Magner echoing off the walls and a driving bassline from Brownstein. Around the 17-minute mark, they drop the tempo noticeably as they head toward 42. The 42 jam here is really neat. Around the 12-13-minute mark, Barber has these great soaring guitar notes that stretch on a few measures at a time, and the rest of the band is locked in to a driving four-on-the-floor rhythm. This scratches my itches in a major way. Crystal Ball is standard. Home Again is fine. This never stretches out far beyond the typical 90 BPM-ish jam that usually accompanies Home Again, and the theme is nothing to write home about (no pun intended).

The first several minutes of Overture are forgettable. Around the 9-minute mark, they turn to a much spacier, more spread out DNB jam, with Magner just tickling Rhodes notes over the top of the rest of the band’s sparse play. They eventually fill back out, and I wish they would have taken a little bit more time to explore the spacier DNB that they hinted at here. Se la vi. After a couple of bland and forgettable minutes, the Vassillios jam takes an interesting turn around the 8:10 mark, as the band heads toward more major key territory. By the 9-minute mark, they’ve crafted a full blown Blissco jam, and a really interesting theme to boot. They eventually leave this theme (far too soon, in my opinion) but the theme they leave for is pretty interesting in its own way. This is a darker trance jam, and Barber’s minimal licks add a great bit of color to the more straightahead trance that Magner, Brownstein, and Allen are locked into. The last Jigsaw jam is a few minutes of forgettable trance. Spacebird winds up stuck in the 6/4 v. 4/4 jam that so frequently troubled them in this era. Reactor does nothing for me here. Have a Cigar is an okay cover, and the B&C encore jam is fine, but nothing special.

Highlights: Jigsaw (2), 42*, Vassillios*