August 16, 2007

Bernstein begins Camp with an extended, dark jam. I’ve seen people gush about this, and while I enjoyed it, I also felt like it got pretty repetitive at parts. Like this was a neat theme, but they just never really expanded upon it. Smell the Funk ending is a neat touch. Boom Shanker begins with the usual downtempo dub jam, but then shifts uptempo as the band makes its approach toward Abyss. The groove here is undeniable, but a lot of this is very disjointed. There are about 12-13 minutes of dance jamming before they drop into Abyss, and of that there is a pretty small section that I found interesting. The section around the 4:45 mark has some really neat stuff from Magner and Brownstein, but Barber just doesn’t seem interested at all in getting on board, and can’t seem to decide what he’s doing here. Honestly, this jam has a metric ton of potential, but Barber almost feels like he’s playing a different jam altogether. Just play some dissonant stuff to go along with your bandmates, dude. Even the last 2 minutes of the jam, Magner switches things up, and Barber still feels like he just massive ADHD. The ending of Abyss has an ambient/space/noise jam before the beginning of HAB. This is about 2 minutes long, and while I’m normally all about this, this particular iteration is only moderately interesting. I’ll note it as a highlight as I’m always for encouraging them to do this more, but only begrudgingly.

Hot Air Balloon here is 32 minutes long. That sounds like it would be right up my alley, but…wow. The first several minutes are beyond bad. In some ways, it feels a bit like the entire set up until this point has sort of led to this outburst from Barber. I’m just blown away by how unenjoyable a good chunk of this jam is. Barber is totally unengaged and disjointed from the rest of the group. Do not like. They stretch out the “flight” section for the last 10 minutes of the show. I don’t know about you, but if I was showing up to day 1 of a music festival, the last thing I’m dying to hear is a 10-minute flight section. They certainly prove me right in that respect, as this is a particularly grating flight section. It felt like it lasted forever. Maybe I was still bitter about the 10+ minutes of noodling from Barber which preceded this, but this was a brutal version of Hot Air Balloon all around. Just awful, and this turns out to be one of my lowest ranked single shows of 2007.

Highlights: B&C