December 28, 2013

Caterpillar begins with the typical midtempo jam. Around the 7-minute mark, Magner has a great arp patch that swirls around the rest of the band and they play with a few drum dropouts and rebuilds. This is neat. As they speed up Brownstein hits a really awesome bassline around the 10:30 mark. I like this a lot. Around 11:30 Magner adds a great lead to really flesh out the jam even more. Really fantastic all the way up through the drop into Boop. Boop begins with a sort of funk jam that slowly evolves into an Abyss intro jam. This doesn’t really get interesting until the switch to the Abyss track, and then it turns into this overtly digital jam with Allen using as many e-drum sounds as he possibly can. Magner and Allen are the real stars here. The Abyss jam is non-existent, and is a drop segue into Dribble. Dribble has a mediocre first jam. The second jam gets really dark and evil. This is really cool. The band allows themselves to really get crazy dark and psychedelic here before beginning the tempo change for the ending of Caterpillar. This is as good as the jam out of Caterpillar was. Very cool stuff.

The Resurrection jam doesn’t do much here. Crystal Ball’s jam begins with a pretty nice progression, but then they drop it abruptly for a transition back toward Resurrection. Damn. The jam out of Resurrection increases in tempo fairly quickly into the jam, but unfortunately they start playing a Tempest Intro jam basically right away. Meh. No jam out of Tempest, just drops into Sound One. Why?

There’s no jam between Spaga and first Floes change. Nor is there one between the change back to Floes. Nor the change back to Spaga again. They finally jam out Spaga, and it’s a pretty predictable DNB jam. The jam back into Floes is similarly predictable. The last Spaga jam is basically a long, boring type 1 jam. Good lord. RLH begins with Brownstein playing the Grass is Green chorus riff over and over again. This doesn’t count as a jam, guys. They switch after about a minute, thankfully. I don’t find the intro particularly compelling, nor do I find the 1st jam. This 2nd jam is supremely frustrating. Allen is doing everything he can here with fills and with digital effects. Instead, Brownstein is more interested in teasing Grass is Green again and again. Absolutely ruins the jam. I think after they get out of this GIG “jam” the ending they craft is pretty nice, but would be a lot nicer if they hadn’t included this unnecessary nonsense.

Highlights: Caterpillar*, Boop, Dribble (2*)