October 18, 2007

The show begins with a Moshi-Fameus Jam preceding the Caterpillar beginning. Even if this isn’t the best Moshi-Fameus, I still enjoy these pretty much every time. The Caterpillar jam here isn’t bad by any means. However, this is pretty much paint by numbers as far as Caterpillar jams go. Not bad, not great. That said, I’m happy to see Marc still has stuck with the proper ending riff. The jam out of TVM quickly finds its footing and escapes the TVM framework, which is nice. They sometimes get caught on that for too long; this is not one of those times. They wind up in a meandering DNB jam that really doesn’t do anything for me at all. The Helicopters jam has a very solid dance jam. This is pretty straightforward, but regardless they hit a great pocket and Barber’s tone is very nice. This could have been much better, but as they get closer and closer to TVM, this gets more and more generic. Speaking of generic, the jam out of TVM into Pygmy is absolutely boring. This is jambandy to a fault, in a bad way. The jam out of Pygmy back into Helix does nothing for me as well, though notably does feature Barber on MIDI keyboard for a bit.

Robots to begin the second set winds up turning into an absolutely massive Blissco jam. Barber here is incredibly on point, and sounds like the Barber of old. His fingers are so quick on some of these riffs, and it feels like the thoughtful, controlled chaos that made people fall in love so deeply with 1.0. It’s not often in 2.0 that you hear Barber play this way, but this is really great stuff. That’s not to say the rest of the band are not on point as well, but to me this is all about Barber. Classic Blissco, great stuff. That said, feels like the peak riff is just shoehorned in out of nowhere. This version of Crickets has an interesting composition. They play the peril riff, then the ending riff, then a full jam, then the ending riff again, then the beginning. It’s almost like a delayed inversion to a certain extent? In any event, the jam in the middle of Crickets is great. This feels like a Memphis first jam, or maybe even a Basis intro. It’s mysterious and has some great textural stuff from Magner and Allen, and Barber kills the artificial peak they build at the end. The next jam into Shelby is not badly played, but it just never gets anywhere interesting. Shelby peak is well done. There’s no jam out of Shelby, just a drop segue into Robots. The Robots ending jam is a dark DNB jam with heavy emphasis on Allen and Magner. I don’t hate this, even given my relatively uneasy relationship with the Biscuits and DNB. The Trucker’s jam has some solid stuff from Magner as he attempts to drag the rest of the band to something thematic. However, it just is never successful and this jam came off real uninteresting to me. Story begins with the clapping from the crowd. Groan. I’ve never understood the clapping. Ever. It just seems annoying to me, but I guess do you. Story is a solid encore here, and they manage to turn this into something interesting rather than the generic jamfunk it can often become. This is mostly Barber with his array of nice little minimalist riffs and Magner playing off of it well. Some might argue it’s just a tease, but sounds to me like a full blown 42 ending fakeout. Neat.

Highlights: Moshi-Fameus, Helicopters, Robots (1**, 2), Crickets (1*), Story