Air Song begins with a mostly-treading-water jam. The City begins with a midtempo jam with Magner on clav. The first few minutes of this are forgettable. Around the 13-minute mark, the band shifts uptempo into a dance jam. This immediately turns more interesting, and the band comes together for a solid dance jam. This is fairly inside the box playing, but nice regardless. The jam out of Ladies ending is a drum and bass jam from the start, and they just can’t seem to get on the same page here. This is frenetic, but in a bad way. The Overture jam is another DNB jam that just does nothing for me. Ladies begins with a dance groove, but quickly changes into something else. This is still upbeat, and still has a primary beat of a four-on-the-floor kick, but Allen throws in lots of tom work here for a neat feel to the jam. Barber has a great chord progression that he comes up with as a sort of capstone to each little stanza of music. I really enjoyed this whole section. As the track switches to The City, the band switches to a piano-heavy, almost honky-tonk sound for a bit, and this lost me in a big way. The jam out of The City is basically just filler into the end of Air Song to end the set.

I love most of the song Papercut. The weird overly-composed part has never once been played without flubs, but the bulk of the song is solid. The jam is again, mostly filler. They force a multi-chord progression that feels a little contrived to me for at least the first few minutes. Oddly, Kamaole Sands features an abrupt, forced key change as well, just a minute or so into the jam. Fortunately in this case, it’s really just to get to the key for Shadow, and there’s no back-and-forth, will-they-won’t-they thing here. The rest of this jam is an uptempo, dark dance jam, and has some soft, plucked synths from Magner to begin, followed by a darker, more digital sound. This is pretty nice. The jam out of Shadow, again, has a forced key change that just feels abrupt. Not sure if they just had last night of tour exhaustion, but these are really lazy switches. The resulting jam, however, is solid. This is nothing earth shattering by any means, but another well-played dance jam headed into Buddha. In Buddha, Brownstein says repeatedly, “Mah teeth are gone,” and follows up with, “Cause it’s a fuckin’ southern show.” Yeah, we get it Marc. The first minute or two of the Buddha jam sound like they’re headed toward a short jam and a Buddha ending. Then they develop a neat little transitional jam with a great guitar riff from Barber. Unfortunately this only lasts another minute or so before they switch to major key to get to Kamaole ending. Dang. The Tunnel has a jam for a few minutes, which doesn’t do a whole lot for me, but is not awful either. They seem to really struggle to get to the ending here for some reason. The jam out of Resurrection has lots of e-drums (primarily Allen’s tabla sounds) from the very start, and for a bit this feels like it could be headed for the start of I-Man. This did not sound like a jam into the ending of Buddha, and felt like they could have and should have turned this much more electronic. There’s no jam out of Triumph, just a drop segue into Lai, and the Lai jam is mediocre to end the show.

Highlights: The City, Ladies (2*), Kamaole*, Shadow

April 25, 2008

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