January 29, 2012

Therapy is standard. Boop starts out with some great phrasing from Magner, and Barber plays off of him very well. Around the 7-minute mark, Brownstein starts a descending four-chord progression and Magner works within this progression remarkably well. This is controlled chaos for sure, and they develop this theme really well. Barber’s harmonizing here works perfectly. The drop is into the beginning of Caterpillar, which is (somewhat) unique. The Caterpillar jam has Magner manipulating a vocal sample of some sort of speech or something. Not clear on what this is, but a bunch of beat repeat being used. This is neat for the novelty, but the jam itself is fairly unremarkable. The first several minutes of the Spacebird jam do very little, if anything for me. They hit a neat theme for about a minute, but it doesn’t stick. Meh. Second Boop jam is jambandy and doesn’t do anything for me, again. The first Robots has a part of it that I really like a lot (Magner’s lead around the 6:40 mark). However, they don’t really develop this theme much, and frankly I think the route they take instead is somewhat predictable. I am normally not a huge fan of Robots 2nd jams, mostly because I don’t think 2.0 is fantastic at playing DNB jams. This one has thematic building, and I think it flows very naturally into the Robots ending. Very solid. AC2B is about as standard as it can get.

Highlights: Boop*, Robots