February 29, 2008

There’s no jam out of Dribble, just a straight drop into Strobelights. Hate when they do this, but whatever. The Strobelights jam beings with a straightahead dance jam. This section is solid, though it’s fairly safe playing overall. Around the 18-minute mark, they get into some dissonant stuff, with Brownstein playing this descending, ominous bass progression. This is a little directionless for a few minutes, but around the 21-minute mark, they lock in, and after a beat dropout, when the beat comes back in it’s almost like the band has been recharged. The resulting jam is really, really cool, with a great main melody from Magner. It’s a little bizarre how they just sort of pull the ripcord and then start playing the Shimmy ending. Shimmy begins with a very pretty Blissco jam. Magner is the all-star here, with some great melodic work and phrasing. Cyclone begins with a pretty straightforward jam, but quickly morphs into this dark, almost evil drum and bass jam. The patch that Magner’s playing is very firmly rooted in the lower end of the frequency, to the point where I thought for a second maybe this was Marc’s MIDI keyboard. I don’t think he debuted that for a while after this, but either way, this was a unique jam just for how sort of off the rails it feels like it could go at any moment. The Dribble “apple butter toast” jam is extended in a way it’s not normally, and Magner sort of goes off on the xylophone-y patch. It almost felt like they were going to take this into full on type 2 territory, but they don’t quite pull the trigger. I don’t normally note this as a “jam” since it’s usually Magner just soloing atop the rest of the band. This is a little bit more like a real jam, albeit a firmly type 1 one. The band itself even seems to acknowledge this with a unique, subdued lyrical section (complete with Brownstein’s awful beatboxing). The jam out of Dribble has a lot of major key stuff going on, and this is pretty obviously a Don ending from about a minute into the jam. That’s not to say this is bad, but just nothing really revelatory here.

Air Song, Overture, and Caves all feature Calhoun on violin. While this adds a neat quirk to the music, it doesn’t do much for the jams in Air Song and Overture, both of which are forgettable. Magner and Calhoun both tease God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman at some point for some reason. Okay. They also tease Carmen and something else I can’t quite place my finger on. Later on in the jam, Magner has a neat theme near the end with his very airy lead patch. Would have loved for them to elaborate on this a little more, but this is a great theme on its own. They take a very long time to get out of the composition from Caves of the East, and what results feels a little bit like a Robots first jam. Imagine my surprise when they eventually drop into Robots. The Robots jam is dark, dissonant, and disappointingly directionless DNB. Technically, the “Costume Contest Jam” is a jam, but they’re essentially just playing nonsense so they can go through the contest. Notably, the winner is a robot. The Lai jam is again, pretty forgettable. The one very neat thing here is Magner teasing The City at 7:27 for just a second, which wouldn’t debut for another 3 weeks or so. Marc did the same thing the night before with Caves of the East. Nice little touch. Highwire encore is jamless.

Highlights: Strobelights**, Shimmy**