October 25, 2007

It's a giant bumburger that the sound on these recordings put a veil over the music....BUT....the "Little Shimmy" ~ ''Cyclone'' ~ In a Conga Line'' is worth the listen, at least once. It's dynamite.

Best part of this show? Moon Boot opener :) Those cosmonauts could party and put out a maniac psych rock party into gear.

My ex-fiance, 2 great friends and I partied hard with Peter Prince at The Gathering of the Vibes in '97. I always had my 4-legged hockey game where you stand and twist the players trying to score goals with a plastic puck. It packed nicely in the bus. Anyhoo, played that for 4 freakin' hours on that thing, on Saturn's cube, higher than high. What a great dude! Of course we saw him at Great Went 2 months later :) As far as 90's /20's jambands' heroes and geniuses, Peter is up there....everyone knew him as MBL opened for EVERYONE for 10 years.

So yeah, check out this "Shimmy"

The sound quality on the only known recording for this show is awful, so that plays into this review quite a bit. DTTB starts out with a dance jam. Feels a lot like treading water for a lot of this before they hit the peak. The real shame of it here is that the Shimmy jam is absolutely fantastic and has this eerie middle-eastern theme. Would be fantastic to actually hear this clearly, but this is definitely the highlight of the show. The jam out of Cyclone back into Shimmy begins as a breakbeat jam but quickly turns into an uptempo dance jam. This is mostly solid, although I won’t lie that the sound quality makes it hard to hear how effective the band really is here. Grass is Green has a really solid dance jam, featuring some rhythmic arps from Magner. Even with the awful sound quality, this had me bobbing my head along. Great stuff.

Waves begins the second set with a 15-minute jam. Hard to argue with that. The beginning section of this jam is fairly straightforward trance, though they eventually drop to half-time just prior to the 11-minute mark. This switch-up is pretty neat, and shows how a different tempo can change things in a really interesting way. They essentially play the exact same music just with a slightly different beat. Cool stuff. They eventually switch back up to a fast trance beat, and Barber goes crazy rock god for the remainder of this. The rest is a fairly predictable Waves peak. There’s no jam into Spacebird, just a “drop” segue. The jam in the middle of Spacebird suffers a lot from the sound quality. I can’t really make out portions of this jam, and in any event this doesn’t really sound all that interesting. Again, no real jam out of Spacebird, just a segue into the middle of Waves. The jam out of 42 into Helicopters is extremely digital, and features Barber on the MIDI keyboard. I’m torn here because I don’t feel like Barber’s really adding anything interesting to this jam, but it’s undeniably fun. When Barber switches back to guitar, they hit on some great dissonant, evil themes. This is awesome stuff. The jam in Helix back into 42 is another very solid dance jam. The interplay here between Barber and Magner is really cool, and ironically because of the poor sound quality it winds up having the feeling of not knowing which is which at times, which isn’t the worst thing in the world. The first AC2B jam here is basically a throwaway. Just Barber shredding and really nothing else. The second jam immediately goes into a dub, downtempo thing with lots of piano from Magner. Second AC2B jam has some interesting stuff, including some pan flute from Magner. Overall, I enjoyed this jam, although it never hit the “next level” for me. The encore has a short jam in it that just barely gets outside of the type 1 framework. Nothing noteworthy here, but a lot of solid stuff through the show in other places. It's truly a shame that there's no soundboard source as this is a fantastic show overall. I wound up scoring this a 5, but I'm willing to bet if I could hear better what was going on, I may have liked some of these jams even more.

Highlights: Shimmy**, Cyclone, GIG, Waves, 42*, Helix, AC2B (2)

Really sucks there isn't a SBD of this show. The middle-eastern Shimmy > Cyclone with Barber using that sitar effect is fucking delicious.