April 18, 2006

KOTW is standard. The Triumph jam gets weirdly upbeat and happy. It’s weird to hear them doing Blissco things with a DNB drumbeat. This is not amazing by any means, but it’s a neat little jam which I enjoyed. The Pilin jam honestly could not be more boring to me. This feels like it takes forever. The jam into RLH and the middle jam both do nothing for me. I wanted to like the middle jam badly, as I’m normally down for anything they do in a major key. However, this just left me uninterested. The last RLH jam gets very dissonant, and I love it. They are absolutely unrelenting here and try to make this as evil as they can for a few minutes, and I’m here for it completely.

The first AC2B jam is airy and exploratory, the way an AC2B first jam ought to be. The second jam, unfortunately, just goes nowhere. They build this patiently enough, but it feels like it’s a ton of water treading. Abraxas is jamless, which still feels so weird to write knowing what a monster that song would later become. They jam out this Strawberry Girl, which is at least a nice change, but the jam itself doesn’t ever wind up as anything interesting. The first Robots jam has a great groove to it, and includes Magner using the Gates of Hell patch – always welcome. Second jam is the fairly typical DNB second jam, without much beyond that. Well-played, but not for me. There is so much botching going on in the Helix encore that the band doesn’t even start the jam in the right place. Magner tries desperately to get the band back on track, but it’s clear Barber is gone. The jam oozes frustration from the rest of the band. Honestly it sounds like they’re still trying to bring Barber back to earth, but dude is just gone. Bad ending to an otherwise pretty decent show.

Highlights: Triumph, RLH (2**), AC2B (1), Robots (1*)