December 30, 2007

Spacebird has an ambient intro that I enjoyed a lot. I’d have been happy if this stretched on much longer. The main Spacebird jam is 20+ minutes long. The first 10 minutes or so are basically forgettable. Around the 15-minute mark of the track, the band hones in on the heavier theme that Brownstein was playing in a call-and-response bit, and we’re off to the races. What results is a dark, gritty theme that features the entire band focusing on making things as evil sounding as possible. At the 18:20 mark, Magner comes in with an absolutely wonderful theme on the organ. This sounds like something out of 70s psychedelic rock in an awesome way. This gets a little bit more psychotic before finally coming back down. Awesome, awesome segment. They eventually drop into a slowed down jam that has another full blown theme. The first few minutes have a Towers of Dub tease from Magner and Brownstein (seems to be a bassline Marc loves to play). However, this eventually turns into a great little theme, particularly the stuff around the 5-minute mark. Barber’s tone and note choice here are really wonderful, and Magner’s piano/strings rounds out the sound absolutely beautifully. This is Blissco-y, and it caps a phenomenal SBMC. There is no jam after Dribble, just a straight drop into Strobelights. Strobelights’ jam is initially not all that interesting. However, from pretty much the second they hit the Munchkin track, this turns into an all-out trance assault. Magner has some absolutely awesome stuff during this jam. Munchkin begins with an absolutely awesome piece of improv. Around the 11:00 mark, the band has some really cool, digital, thematic stuff going on. For the next 2 minutes, this is great. Then they kinda ditch this for a return to S&M, and the resulting jam is far less interesting the rest of the way here. Missed opportunity, in my book.

The first Robots jam has some really neat stuff from Magner. I felt like Barber was not adding a lot here at the end, but in the middle section of this jam, he sets up Magner’s harmonic (and later, lead melodic) stuff really nicely. The second jam goes basically nowhere and leads to an almost-painful-to-listen-to Shelby peak. The Buddha jam has a lot of potential. This is dark, digital, and dancy. Unfortunately they never really do much with it and suddenly we hit Dribble. Dribble here has a fairly extended “apple butter toast” section, but this never really turns into a jam so much as a long Magner solo. The jam out of Dribble just never does anything interesting for me. There’s one point where Barber has this minimalist riff that I really thought they’d turn into something great, but it just never happened. The Memphis first jam here is a the hip-hop, e-drum heavy jam that became popular with the band around this time. I have to admit I’m a sucker for this jam, and they can pretty much do this spacey, hip-hop sound whenever they want as far I’m concerned. I think this particular version could have been better, but it’s mostly very solid, including the rock god Barber stuff near the end of the jam. The second jam is basically just a jam into the ending of 7-11 from the very start. The Magellan encore here features Sam Altman on drums. While this is neat, I still always feel these are pretty forgettable, and this early on in the 2.0 days, it still seems weirdly insulting to Allen in my mind, but it is what it is. The first jam is short and a fairly typical Magellan jam. The second is ten minutes long, and at one point turns into an uptempo dance jam. Mostly, this jam is forgettable and I didn’t care about a lot of it.

Highlights: Spacebird (Intro*, 2**), S&M**, Robots (1), Memphis (1*)