April 30, 2006

Floodlights is fine, if forgettable. Cigar and Crystal Ball are standard. The jam out of Waves begins with the typical minor key trance, but as they get closer and closer to the Crickets transition, they develop this beautiful little theme. This is borderline Blissco, and Magner in particular has some lovely harmonies here. The middle jam here in Crickets is very boring to me, but Allen is phenomenal throughout. He’s clearly trying to play off of the other members as best he can, but nobody is really interested in doing anything useful here. The jam out of Crickets back into waves is a little weird to me. It almost has like a videogame-y sound to me. This doesn’t really land for me, but it’s at least unique sounding, which is something.

Story is very mediocre major key house jamming. This goes nowhere. The same is true with the jam back into Story. Honestly, this whole sequence sounds exactly how you’d expect, and this is basically a half-hour of forgettable music. Add in the jamless Barfly that follows. The Ape jam is a DNB jam that features a little too much of noodly Barber for my tastes. There’s no attempt here to make anything cohesive. This is just the entire band jamming as fast as they can for the overwhelming majority of the jam. I don’t know what was going on with the band here, but Sven is played so, so fast. Like wow. HDPF first jam is the usual type 1 jam. Nothing unique here. However, the second jam is really phenomenal. Both Barber and Brownstein have a lot of staccato, repeating riffs here, and the play by everybody is really nice. I’ve seen people call this best ever – I do not agree. Very cool jam, but best ever seems like a pretty huge stretch.

Highlights: Waves*, HDPF (2*)