August 30, 2007

Take a Bow begins with a 2-3 minute long ambient/space thing. This is solid, and I’ll always praise them for playing these. Robots begins with a great groove-based jam in the first jam slot, and Magner has this great theme that extends over several measures, while Barber comes up with a great little rhythmic riff to balance out Magner’s extended theme. This theme carries on for several minutes, and they expand it a little bit before changing to a more major key sound/feel around the 14-minute mark. For a bit after they drop into the Lunar track, it sounds like they could be headed for a segue into Papercut – like a lot. I forgot the order of this as I was listening and was sure that this was what was coming. This whole little theme is absolutely phenomenal, and the fact that it was totally disconnected from Papercut (or anything else) makes it that much cooler. They develop this into a neat little theme with Barber playing sort of a riff (no pun intended) on the Take A Bow vocal melody from earlier in the show. The Lunar jam begins with some really great stuff from the entire band. Unfortunately, around the 11:40 mark, they get into some very uninteresting stuff. I believe this is Allen who is playing the little electronic telephone tone type sounds, and this just does nothing at all for me. The next 5 minutes or so are just this sort of dissonant sound, though I think they recover really well around the 19-minute mark as they slow down and return to a more melodic sound. The jam out of Papercut is a fantastic thematic jam, and features some soaring guitar riffs from Barber. This is probably the best Papercut jam in existence, although I could see the argument being made for a couple others. The Crickets jam features the plucky string synth that Magner famously used in the Memphis > Helicopters from Bonnaroo 2008. This has a lot of potential in the early section of the jam, particularly as the band feels like it’s headed for a multi-chord, thematic jam. However, this is really mostly a build into the middle of Crickets. This is cohesive, but just didn’t do much for me musically. The second Crickets jam is mostly very repetitive, and has nothing of interest save for some thirst quenchers from Allen.

The second set begins with a little ambient/space thing, similar to the first set. This is a little more Floydian, particularly Barber’s guitar, and this literally lasts just around a minute. Tough for me to label this a highlight, but I still enjoy this, regardless. The jam out of Glastonbury has a great feel for the first several minutes. This is melancholic and almost sounds like it could be a song at different parts. I’ll be honest – this is fairly simplistic, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s absolutely wonderful. Barber in particular here plays some beautiful stuff, and this is just pure, unadulterated Blissco. Gorgeous. The second jam in Robots is mostly forgettable DNB. Allen is on fire here, as always, but the rest of the band just does not really interest me much in this jam. The Spaga jam features Magner on the pan flute patch in an otherwise uninteresting DNB jam. I love what Magner’s doing here, but other than that, the rest of the band is sort of treading water. I noted this as a highlight simply because of how much I enjoyed what Magner is playing. It really, really feels like they are headed to the Spaga ending. This almost feels like a fakeout of a fakeout. In any event, they eventually start up Munchkin instead, which is fine by me as I can’t imagine the second Spaga jam would have resulted in anything interesting anyway. The jam in Munchkin honestly felt like the entire 8-minute jam was just one long ending jam. Tough to get too interested in that.

Highlights: Take A Bow (Intro), Robots (1**), Lunar, Papercut**, Glastonbury**, Spaga