April 05, 2009

An average show with some bright spots. Not as good as Tahoe.

Great 'City' feels good between 'Overtures'. Very cool intro jam to 'RLH' until it petered out like I do at 3am in the midst of explaining "that never happens to me. weird". Good 2nd jam. 'Cyclone' was good but didn't peak out, nice intro into 'Story (><)' 'Mirrors' was good in it's basics. Encore looks like heaven on paper although when you are rushed you cut corners and when you cut corners you have an octagon. I'm a sucka for 'Vasses in the masses'

An incredible showing for Brownie. Behind the somewhat routineness of this shows lies an A+ performance by Marc from beg > end. i.e. "City~>outro~>Overture" !! "Story" Vass" and beg. of "Run"

7.05 / 10 show

If you wear patchouli, blind people will hate you too.

Plan B has a straightforward middle jam. The jam out switches to a four-on-the-floor beat fairly quickly. Around the 11-minute mark, this gets much faster and the resulting jam is a great Cyclone intro. They don’t quite peak this the way they often did around this time, but still very solid. Cyclone begins with a sort of spacey jam with Brownstein using the MIDI keyboard to provide lots of atmospheric bass. Allen has lots of textural e-drums ping-ponging around here, and I enjoy this a lot. I wish they would have explored this a little bit more, but instead they switch to a major key sound and head toward Story. Eh. The Story jam was very boring to me. The Buddha peak is decent. Munchkin is fine.

Overture begins the second set with some DNB that I don’t hate. Allen is on fire, and Magner has some cool spacey effects I liked a lot. The switch up to half-time also features some solid thematic work before the switch to The City. The jam out of the City is fantastic. Magner has this ethereal, dreamy theme that he plays throughout most of the jam, and the band slowly builds from The City tempo back up to an Overture jam. Great stuff. The RLH intro is eight minutes or so. I found most of this to be filler, with the exception of the last three minutes, wherein Magner develops this great descending chord theme that the band follows for the rest of the jam. I thought this section was really cool, and mostly redeemed the jam for me. The first RLH jam lasts only a few minutes and it is pretty boring. Second jam has a decent peak, but the theme preceding it is again, boring. Mirrors is jamless. The Waves jam begins with the typical fast trance, and after a minute or two, Barber has a nice minimal riff that he adds to push the jam forward. Magner adds the pan flute in a creative way around the 6-minute mark, and this is used more for atmospheric effect than as a lead. With the exception of that, this jam is pretty much filler, but I still liked the flute part enough that I noted it as a highlight. The encore jam in Vassillios is also straightforward, although less interesting. Still, very solid show overall.

Highlights: Plan B (2), Cyclone*, Overture, The City*, RLH (Intro), Waves