October 16, 2007

Frog Legs begins the show, jamless. B&C begins with a major key jam that feels like they’re hesitant to get into type 2 territory for some reason. However, after they break that hesitancy, they embark on a long, dark, and digital jam. This is duntzgeon stuff, and Barber hops on the MIDI keyboard for a bit which isn’t awful, and actually seems to contribute to the jam. There were portions of this that felt a little repetitive, but overall I found this really engaging and interesting. The Confrontation jam is absolutely enormous, and it’s truly a shame that there’s no soundboard recording as this has such a digital, electronic sound. Allen and Brownstein in particular crush this jam, with Magner and Barber playing mad scientist roles in the upper registers of the jam. There were so many different parts of this where I thought, “We must be getting to the end of the jam here,” only for them to embark on a variation on the theme. If the B&C jam is duntzgeon jamming, this is duntzgeon times a thousand. If you like dark, dirty, dancy TDB, this jam is absolutely for you. So, so, so awesome. HAB begins with Brownstein and Barber doing some solid communicating, even if the music that’s coming out of them isn’t all that interesting. Near the end of the HAB track, they land on this sort of lullaby-esque Blissco sound with Barber and Magner playing well off of each other for the return to B&C. I thought this was solid, although far too short and not developed as much as I’d have liked. Would have loved them to stretch this out another 5 minutes or so before returning to B&C. At times, this particular jam felt a little like a 1.0 jam (in a good way), particularly Barber’s play.

The first HDPF is about as generic as they come, with nobody ever really stepping up to lead. Apparently the band was doing whiskey shots with the drummer from the Travis Tritt Band on stage, so this might account for the mediocre play. Who knows? In any event, the second jam suffers the same fate, and the Tritt drummer leaves the stage. Hooray. Anyway, back to the show. AC2B begins with an intro jam that sounds like Marc is possibly thinking about a Shem-Rah intro fakeout. This isn’t terribly interesting. The first AC2B jam is about the same – a lot of water treading, nothing interesting going on until Barber teases a (very out of tune) HDPF peak riff. Okay then. Voices Insane features a few different AC2B teases from Barber. The band jams out of an unfinished Voices, which I’ll always take. Not that I don’t love the ending, but I find Voices jams tend to be interesting in many cases. This version certainly makes a strong case for that. The first several minutes of the jam out are dark, dissonant, ominous jamming. The band gets slower and slower until they eventually dissolve into an ambient jam. This is pretty rare for Fall Tour 2007, which was more known for it’s dance jams than this type of introspective, spacey jamming. Regardless, this is somehow even better than the Confrontation earlier in the night. Ridiculous stuff, and a very organic build back into AC2B. The final AC2B jam just does nothing at all for me. Reactor’s jam is fast, but that’s about all I can say about it. They switch up trance and DNB, but this never really settled on anything I find interesting. Dribble first jam is pretty straightforward. I have a hard time getting into a lot of Dribble first jams. This one features Barber hopping on to MIDI keyboard for a bit. There was a part of this where they venture into major key territory very briefly that I enjoyed, but other than that this is a lot of wasted effort. The Munchkin encore has a solid dance jam with some cool thematic stuff before it gets a little too heavy on the organ later in the jam.

Highlights: B&C**, Confrontation**, HAB*, Voices**, Munchkin