January 24, 2009

Uber Glue is jamless. Rivers has its usual 2-minute jam. RLH has a decent intro jam here. This is pretty straightforward, but I still enjoyed it. Would have been nice if it lasted a little longer, but what can you do? In fact, this seems to be a recurring theme of the night – solid, straightforward jams. The jam out of RLH is good as well, but nothing that necessitates listening to this multiple times. The first jam in Crickets begins with Brownstein on the MIDI keyboard. Beyond that, there’s really nothing notable about this jam. They do a decent build prior to the return to the song, but thematically this is mostly uninteresting. Oh, also, Magner does use the square wave lead here which I always like to point out as it tends to be a fan favorite. Incidentally, the jam out also features Magner on the square wave lead. Around the 16:20 mark, Brownstein begins playing a VI-VII-I progression, and for three minutes or so the band plays around with this theme. Unfortunately, they ditch this for the transition to Abyss, which is a little disappointing since it felt like they could have built this into more. The last five minutes or so prior to the drop into Abyss are a dark, digital, duntzgeon jam. They do not do the full-on peak prior to the drop which was common in this era, and instead just sort of slide into the Abyss composition in a nice way. The jam out of Abyss and back into RLH begins with Brownstein on slap bass, and this is mostly filler until they hit the return to RLH to end the set.

Tamarin Alley and HSR are both jamless. Morph has the typical midtempo funk jam to begin, with lots of Magner on the Virus lead. They eventually shift uptempo and it starts to sound like they’re headed to Ladies, mostly because of Marc. However, they pull back and shift toward Basis instead. This whole jam is pretty mediocre to me. The jam out of Basis is a solid dance jam. This isn’t anything too far outside of the box, but Brownstein has some fantastic, driving basslines littered throughout this jam. Not much more to say beyond that. The peak into Waves is fine. The Waves jam is again, solid, straightforward. There is a neat little part where they almost are teasing the beginning of Bazaar Escape, though they don’t quite make this a full-on tease. The Reactor jam is another inoffensive, decent dance jam, though less so than the others in this show. Mulberry’s dream has one short type one jam, and rather than the second type one jam, the second portion is basically just a long solo from Barber. Nothing notable here. The Sven jam is actually decent for a DNB jam and has a lot of Brownstein on MIDI keyboard. Allen destroys this jam, and while I’m not the biggest fan of TDB drum and bass, this was at least entertaining.

Highlights: RLH (Intro, 1), Crickets (2*), Basis, Waves, Sven