November 02, 2007

Strobelights begins with a jam featuring a whole lot of gated arp from Magner, which seems to carry the majority of this jam. At around the 10-minute mark, Allen drops the e-kick which seems to push the jam into new territory. I wanted to like this a lot, but it just never got to the next level for me. The jam out of Ladies begins as a fairly typical dance jam, but turns uptempo sharply as the band heads toward the middle of Crickets. Interestingly, up till this point in 2007, they had been using the slowed down section of Crickets as the “middle” as opposed to the peak. This version marked the change which ultimately became commonplace moving forward for the band. This is a well-done version. The jam out of Crickets feels like a lot of water treading until they finally move uptempo for Lunar Pursuit. I didn’t hate this, but didn’t love it either. Lunar has a jam in the middle, which they continued to do for a while in 2007. This one is mostly meandering, although I love Barber’s tone for a good chunk of this, particularly when it’s very delayed. The jam out of Lunar has a great little happy-go-lucky theme from the band, bordering on a Blissco jam. Feels like they could have stretched this out more before getting into Sound One territory, but I enjoyed this a lot anyhow.

The standalone Caterpillar here is a solid jam, but nothing more. This really doesn’t have any unique qualities to it beyond solid playing from the band and a long, extended ending jam. The Crickets jam doesn’t really have anything of note here, and they botch the transition into Boop. The jam out of Boop gets out of the generic funk pretty quickly and into a breakbeat jam that melds seamlessly into Buddha beginning. This segue is way cooler than the jam itself. The Buddha jam here is easily the highlight of the night. This is a dark, ominous, duntzgeon jam. Awesome stuff from everybody, particularly Brownstein and Magner. The Moshi-Fameus jam in 42 is fine, but this is not the best MF jam, and would have been nice to have an actual jam which would justify sitting through 42. Meh. The Grass is Green encore jam features Barber with some spooky sounds on the MIDI keyboard (I think?) for part of this. Overall, this jam just doesn’t do much for me, and is a pretty “jammy” sounding jam.

Highlights: Ladies*, Lunar (2*), Buddha**