March 04, 2009

Meditation to begin the show is jamless. Caterpillar has a solid jam, and features Magner using the "rolling" arp yet again, as was common around this time. This never really gets out of first gear, but I don't hate it. Pygmy has another solid jam coming out of it, featuring, a great little chord progression from Magner and Brownstein beginning around the 5:30 mark or so. This section doesn't last that long, and at the 7:35 mark, the band shifts uptempo into a dance jam. The rest of the Pygmy track is absolutely fantastic, with Magner playing some wonderful melodic stuff over a solid progression from Brownstein. I love the way this developed and wished it would have lasted longer. The jam out of Confrontation begins with a brief 42 tease from Barber and Brownstein. But other than that, this does nothing for me. The same is true of the jam out of Lunar.

The first several minutes of the Jamilia jam are mostly filler. Around the 7:30 mark, Barber comes up with this great descending guitar riff. The band builds around this as Brownstein develops a three chord progression, and Allen increases the tempo. In the last two minutes or so of the Jamilia track, the band hits on an absolutely sublime Blissco theme. Despite a large chunk of this jam being filler, these few minutes make it absolutely worth the price of admission. For this reason, this is widely seen as one of the best versions of Jamilia of all-time. Terrible song though. Story begins with the usual funk jam, but around the 6-minute mark, Brownstein starts playing a Tricycle-adjacent theme, and the rest of the band follows suit. Around 8:00, they switch to a more dissonant sound to prepare for the shift into Shimmy. I don't care too much about the rest of this. Tamarin Alley begins, oddly enough, with a trance jam. While I don’t find much appealing about this particular jam, it is nice that they’re actually jamming out the song. I believe this is actually the first time they jammed out of Tamarin Alley. Eventually, the trance jam gives way to a dub theme, which is very well done. Magner in particular has some really great melodic work, which continues as the band shift back uptempo to head towards Helicopters. As they get toward Helicopters, the band develops a great theme, and they do an odd, subdued transition into Helicopters. Okay then. The Helix jam features a lot of arps from Magner and a solid dance groove throughout. This is a nice jam with lots of digital stuff from Magner and Allen, though very safely inside of the box. The return to Story is fine. Robots features two 10+-minute jams, which is always welcome. The first Robots jam is, again, pretty safely inside of the box, but has a solid dissonance to it during the latter half. The second jam is extremely straightforward, though well-played at least. Both Jigsaw jams are largely forgettable to me, although there's a neat Bazaar Escape tease in the second.

Highlights: Caterpillar, Pygmy**, Tamarin Alley*, Helix, Robots (1)