April 14, 2006

Don't listen to haters. This run kicks ass.

Tripped out Shimmy of the tour, great Spaga and the Very~>Shem is incredible. Marc summons the Bootsy vibes wonderfully. Very original. Lastly, Floodlights is one to remember.

Is it as good as the way they were playing at the end of the tour? Hell no. But after one of the hardest year in their history culminating into a big Euro tour.....I think this run deems redemption and multiple listens (in segments)

an easy 7.5 / 10

~Stoke The Fires Of Paradise With Coals From Hell To Start~

Shimmy gets very weird right out of the gate. This jam is fantastic and features the band really getting out there in a psychedelic way. The entire band is locked in and interested only in pushing this jam in ways that 2.0 rarely did/does. If you played this for me and told me this was a 1.0 jam, I would probably believe it. Very cool. The Floodlights jam here doesn’t do a whole lot for me. There’s a decent groove here, but not much else. WIS is standard. The Spaga jam is very cool. The band has an evil, plodding pace to it, despite the frenetic DNB drumbeat. The contrast between Brownstein/Magner vs. Barber and Allen is really cool. I’m not sure what got into the band for this show, but this and Shimmy are further out there than I think they’ve allowed themselves to get thus far into 2006. Around the 12-minute mark, the band comes back from this more dissonant, psychedelic sound to a more thematic piece of improv, featuring a two-chord progression that Magner and Barber use as the foundation to play off of one another very nicely. Second jam is basically a type 1 jam for the entirety of it that (conversely) never gets outside the box.

Abraxas has a jamless debut. A jamless Abraxas feels so wrong. The first TVM jam never gets outside the box at all and remains firmly a type 1 jam throughout. The second jam is just okay. They build an artificial peak near the end, which is pretty neat. The segue into SRB goes from The Very Funk directly into the SRB beginning. Not really a real segue, but it is what it is. The Shem-Rah jam is extended a great deal. While this is a 29-minute version, it should be noted that only about 16 minutes here is jamming. While I love extending things this much, there just isn’t much here that I found interesting or worth revisiting. The Buddha jam features Magner playing around with the xylophone patch quite a bit. I am sort of a sucker for this patch, and even though I think what the rest of the band is doing is not all that interesting for a good chunk of this, I liked this regardless. The jam back into Buddha from Cyclone is okay. They hit a nice dance groove for a good chunk of this, but it never really reaches the next level for me. Wet encore is standard.

Highlights: Shimmy**, Spaga (1**), Buddha