January 30, 2009

High Speed Racer is jamless to begin the show. Papercut begins with a straightforward jam for the first 4-5 minutes. Around the 10:30 mark, Allen cuts the beat for 8 bars, and Barber starts playing this eighth-note pattern. Barber mixed with Magner here is absolutely ridiculously cool sounding, and when Allen brings the beat back in the resulting theme with the beat and Brownstein’s bass pattern is absolutely awesome. Unfortunately, this literally lasts like a minute or so. That said, I still adore this. Spacebird contains a long-ish intro jam. This starts out with a spacey sound and no beat. Allen uses cymbals only here to really allow the melodic players to craft a very cool soundscape. After a couple of minutes, Allen drops a slow, four-on-the-floor beat while the rest of the band continues this psychedelic soundscape. Brownstein hops on the MIDI keyboard for the next few minutes, and Magner busts out the “Meditation” synth patch, while Allen throws in some e-drums for good measure. This is a very unique sounding jam as it’s basically all space over the top of a driving, simple drumbeat. There’s really not much in the way of theme building here, but this is incredibly awesome regardless. Spacebird is pretty straightforward for the first few minutes, but the riff that Barber comes up with at 14:13 is very cool. Simple but highly effective. This little section is great, but it feels like they never really get out of second gear. Around the 16-minute mark, Magner switches on to the pan flute patch, and then interestingly, he plays an almost identical melody to the 1/25 Lunar Pursuit and 1/29 Cyclone. This must have been something he was working on at the time, because it’s came up three times over a 5-day span. There’s also a note at the 18:41 mark where Barber and Magner play perhaps the worst combination of notes they possibly could, resulting in a borderline painful mixture of sounds. Sounds like they hit with similar tones on notes that were only a half-step apart. Yikes. In any event, the last couple minutes of this are a big build into the beginning of Buddha, and they proceed to butcher the drop into Buddha. The Buddha jam begins with a straightforward dance jam. They wind up centering this jam around the melody that Magner comes up with around the 6-minute mark. This is catchy, although they don’t really do a whole lot with it. Eventually just sort of bail on this theme and hit towards the ending of space bird.

Lithium is obviously jamless. Jamilia is an awful song, let’s just call it what it is. The jam out of it comes out of the 7/4 section, and eventually turns into an uptempo, four-on-the-floor beat, leading into the Reactor peak. This, as well as the jam coming out of Reactor, I found totally forgettable and boring. Dribble begins with Magner playing this descending melody on a “detuned” synth. This synth has a really cool sound to it, even if I’m not in love with this specific riff. The band develops a nice little groove here, and the communication between Magner and Barber is nice. Around the 8-minute mark, they make a deliberate change in their sound, and Magner has some really great stuff going on between his piano play, the plucky, detuned synth, and the big string synths that he is messing around with. This jam is all about Magner to me, although I also really love around 9:30 when Allen starts bringing in a bunch of tom fills as accents to the jam. The last few minutes of this jam are less about theme building and more about cool interplay between the band members. I felt like Brownstein got stuck in a bit of a repeater issue, but beyond that this was solid. The first several minutes of the Vassillios jam feature a VI-VII-I progression, a staple of the band, especially in this era. However, this particular version goes absolutely nowhere. The last two minutes or so of this track feature Brownstein switching to the MIDI keyboard before Orch Theme. Orch Theme is left unfinished, and the jam out is almost completely forgettable. That is, with the exception of a weird vocal tease of Tricycle by Brownstein around the 9:30 mark. They do this sort of subdued, laid-back Tricycle jam before dropping into Safety Dance. The encore features a jamless Meditation followed by what is essentially a long type one Morph jam. Magner uses and arpeggiator for the bulk of this jam, and in general this is very well-worn territory. The same is true for the short Mr. Don jam in the second encore.

Highlights: Papercut**, Spacebird*, Buddha, Dribble