February 04, 2009

Papercut begins with the usual midtempo jam, and almost sounds like Magner is going to do a Fanfare for the Common Man tease, but never quite gets there. Allen eventually drops a double time kick drum and they head into a monotonous, forgettable Crickets peak. The first jam in Crickets is a similarly forgettable midtempo jam. The band isn’t necessarily “bad” here as they’re communicating fairly well, but this just was not interesting to me in the least. The second Crickets jam has Magner using an extremely fast-paced arpeggiated patch at the outset. This is a fast, driving trance jam, and Brownstein utilizes a descending baseline for the first few minutes. I didn’t find this all that interesting, but it’s at least cohesive again. Ultimately, the transition into Svengali is fine, but can essentially be skipped entirely without missing anything good. There is a three-minute long Spectacle intro that is actually very pretty. I wish they would’ve stretch this out a little bit more, but for me this is the first highlight of the show. The first jam in Mulberry’s is the usual surf rock jam with nothing really interesting going on. The second jam sounds like it could be a typical second jam as well, but the band instead shifts towards Abyss. I noted this as a highlight, though there are at least a few minutes of this that are just totally forgettable. That said, there is some decent stuff here. The band then proceeds to absolutely butcher the composition for Abyss, which is almost impressive. They can’t seem to decide if Barber’s noodling is part of the song or not. Then when they go to switch to the major key section, Barber continues to play the minor key section. Just sad all around. The return jam to Mulberry’s is decent, but just way too short. This only lasts a couple minutes before they hit the Mulberry’s ending.

Robots first jam has some solid “funk” stuff in it that I found acceptable, as compared with the meandering they often get caught up in with this jam. Second jam is forgettable DNB with a lot of sloppiness from Barber. Ladies has a four-chord progression that begins with Brownstein, and concludes with Magner doing a bunch of melodic work using the virus. While this is generally – again – very cohesive, I never really felt like it got to the next level. Barber is barely involved in this jam, and I think had he stepped forward a little bit more, this could’ve gotten very cool. The Morph jam is a straightforward jam that is nearly type one the entire time. Voices encore is jamless.

Highlights: Spectacle (Intro), Mulberry’s (2), Robots (1), Ladies