July 02, 2006

Highwire > RLH has basically two jams. The jam out of Highwire has some neat parts, but ultimately this was not super memorable to me. I thought the second jam had some great stuff from Magner, but the band never really came to a cohesive theme. TVM jams are both pretty typical. The big I-Man/Helix thing is a novelty that I am not entirely into. They don’t really get to an actual jam until the third switch back to Helix. To their credit, this is the first noteworthy jam of the show for me. This sounds at parts like it could be headed to Abyss, and this is a straightforward dance jam, which is well-played. There’s a very short jam before I-Man middle which just isn’t long enough to be useful. The last I-Man jam has a great vibe from everybody in the band. Magner jumps on the xylophone patch, and Barber’s guitar is affected with plenty of delay. I loved this. Overture is jamless, though they’ve got that Bach thing added in. Bullets is jamless. Mulberry’s has a short type 1 jam. 42 is mostly quite good. Nothing here is too far outside the box, but this is dancy and solid. Spacebird is a lot of treading water for the entirety of it. Robots first jam is nothing outside of the box, but this is a great example of when that’s totally fine. The entire band locks into an undeniable groove. This is just four guys who are lost in the moment on a fantastic little pocket of music. Great stuff. Second Robots jam is the standard DNB which does zero for me.

Highlights: Helix, 42, I-Man (2**), Robots (1**)