M80 to begin the show is jamless. Meditation is jammed once again, which is about the only note coming out of these opening few jams. Both this, and the two jams in AC2B are just totally forgettable. The Suspended in the Air jam stays in type 1 territory for pretty much its entirety. The second jam has some dark, ominous stuff going on, and in general I enjoyed this. Granted, this never really gets out of first gear, but I noted it as a highlight nonetheless. The band eventually switches into a DNB jam in order to head to inverted robots. Or rather, this begins sounding like they are going toward an inverted Robots, but instead they play the beginning. But they don’t play the entire beginning (with the big intro hits), instead dropping into the “verse” of the song. Odd. In any event the gym out of robots is a “funk” jam, and the band gets stuck in a bit of a repeater for quite a while. Near the very end of the Robots track, Brownstein switches on to the MIDI keyboard, and the band shifts gears to head towards Basis. The Basis intro jam is only 2-3 minutes long, and not all that interesting. Why do this? There is a middle Basis jam which only lasts about a minute and a half, but this is one of the ambient jams that they sometimes do in the Basis middle section. This is really cool and psychedelic and even though it’s very short I’ll still note this as a highlight because I absolutely love when they do this. The Basis jam itself is a solid dance jam but not much more than that.

CWB begins the second set with a slow, piano/guitar-filled jam. After a couple minutes of this, the band shifts uptempo into a dance beat, with Brownstein initially playing in 3/4 time over the 4/4 trance beat. This is very cool, and very unique for a jam out of CWB. Instead of finishing the song, they shift uptempo into a sort of rocky jambandy jam. There’s a lot of Barber here, and this is really not electronic in anyway, though not necessarily bad. I’ve seen some people say this is in the conversation for best CWB ever, and I think they’re really just pointing out what a unique jam this is coming out of the song. Don’t get me wrong, this is very good, but I wanted more from it to get to “that” level. The Voices jam begins with some straightforward stuff, and eventually shifts into a breakbeat jam with some nice melodic work from Magner. I enjoyed this, although there’s really nothing all that crazy going on here. Around the 15-minute mark, they get slower and a little more subdued, and while I enjoyed this section as well, this again was nothing remarkable. After this, they shift uptempo and develop a decent Crickets peak. The first Crickets jam is very boring, and features Magner going up the scale and back down the scale while the rest of the band basically follows. Super meh. Near the end of this they at least hit a decent theme that almost sounds like it could be headed to Astronaut ending at one point, but instead pulls back into HAB. The HAB jam has Brownstein switching on to MIDI keyboard almost immediately, and Magner has some nice melodic stuff throughout the beginning of this. However, around the 11-minute mark this again becomes pretty boring filler. I didn’t find the rest of this — the return to Voices — interesting either. No jam out of Voices, just a drop into Crickets ending and the beginning follows. They then play another forgettable jam, this time a DNB jam that is obviously headed to Munchkin. The Munchkin jam only lasts 4 minutes, but this is not awful, and after the 30 minutes or so which preceded it being basically filler, I’ll take it.

IRW to begin the third set is jamless, obviously. TVM first jam is super short and all type 1. Second jam at least has some solid Magner leads going into the Astronaut return. They jam out the Astronaut outro, which turns into a solid if generic dance jam with a big peak before dropping into Gangster. The jam out of Gangster back into HAB is fine. Most of this third set is forgettable with the exception of the Astronaut outro, and unless you’re into the novelty of “Low,” you can probably skip the encore as well. This show is remembered far more fondly than warranted, particularly given that it is bookended by two vastly superior shows.

Highlights: Basis (1*), CWB**, Voices, Munchkin, TVM (2), Astronaut (2)

February 14, 2009

Reviews

Treemaculate

tpace

All-Timers