February 05, 2009

The first Jigsaw jam is a short, straightforward “chase” jam. The second jam begins as a fairly straightforward trance jam but shifts to a drum and bass jam. Strangely enough, the far more interesting part of this jam is what occurs after the switch to drum and bass. Barber and Magner have some great harmonizing and interplay, and Brownstein’s bassline is almost a tease of Gonna Fly Now. I don’t know if this is intentional, and could be a total coincidence. In any event, this had me bobbing my head along. The jam out of Onamae Wa is largely filler. The B&C jam begins as a jambandy jam, but around the 8-minute mark shifts into dark trance for the Nughuffer switch. I thought this was generally pretty good, though they kept this pretty safely inside the box. Brownstein explains in the Nughuffer story that because this is such a small show, they plan on doing a set of all new songs in the second set. The jam back into B&C is fine.

This second set is very confusing to me. Brownstein says during the Nughuffer jam that this is the set that he’s been waiting to play since New Year’s Eve, and that he’s excited to play all of the band’s new songs in a single set. That I get. What I don’t get is playing these songs in mostly the same way that they’ve been playing them and playing several of these songs as jamless versions. Like isn’t that the point of taking the risk of playing an entire set of new songs? Stretch your legs a bit, see what these songs are made out of. As a band that is mostly known for its improv, I firmly believe that all of these songs could have eventually become fan favorites if the band would have simply committed to jamming them out. Instead, we get jamless versions of Uber Glue, High Speed Racer, M80, and The City. Wow.

As to the jamming, Meditation to begin the set is at least jammed out, and this is essentially exactly what a Meditation jam should sound like: hip-hop tempo with some interesting melodic stuff from Magner in addition to spacey atmospheric stuff, developing a chord progression through Brownstein, etc. Even though I wasn’t blown away by this, I still really enjoyed it for what it was. Inexplicably, Rivers has the exact same 2-3 minute long jam that it had for months already. One would think in a 15-minute version of the song that there would be an actual middle jam. Additionally, given that this and Tamarain Alley are the only new songs at the time that had an actual ending section, I don’t know why they wouldn’t have taken this as an opportunity to split up Rivers or Tamarin Alley. The jam out of Rivers immediately changes keys for the shift to Uber Glue. This jam last 5-6 minutes or so, and I actually enjoyed it. However, it does highlight one of the issues with many of these new songs, which is that the band clearly never decided how they would segue into these songs. At the beginning of Rivers and then at the beginning of Uber Glue, the band essentially just dissolves into an almost ambient jam, and then starts playing the song. Rockafella has a very short jam in it. Magner continues to play the melody from the “rolling down the window” section of the song for nearly the entirety of this jam with the exception of about 90 seconds. The bummer here is that those 90 seconds of type 2 jamming are actually very cool, and could’ve developed into something great if the band would simply give it room to breathe. The jam out of Tamarin Alley is basically a 3-minute long intro jam into The City. Total filler. There is no jam in The City, and the Story encore is almost entirely forgettable.

Highlights: Jigsaw (2), B&C, Meditation, Rivers (2)