March 29, 2014

The Strobelights jam is a decent start to a festival set. This is nowhere near breaking any ground or really doing anything all that interesting, but it’s got a solid groove and should be likely to bring in new ears to the party. The Story jam doesn’t do much for me, and Brownstein tips his hand for the Spacebird transition way, way too soon. Seeing a 17-minute jam out of Spacebird at a festival set is heartening. Typically, the band seems to hover in the 10-minute range or so, and are less willing to do extended improvs like this. The band drops into some half-time dub for a little bit, and after a few minutes of that, they start building the pace back up. Around the 15-minute mark, Barber comes up with this simple little lick that has an ascending three-note peak as a capstone, and it’s so damn catchy. Magner is content here to just mess around with some sounds and play counterpoint to Barber. This section of the jam is really cool. After the band increases in speed, Barber spends an odd amount of time in the lower registers using some FX, and after he switches back to a cleaner tone, Magner jumps on his own FX, utilizing a vocoder in a really neat way. Overall, this entire jam has a few different sections, with the 2nd and 3rd sections particularly cool.

The Shimmy jam begins with the band in intense focus. They have a very deliberate 8-bar theme that has the first 4 bars as the “call” and the second 4 bars as the “response.” After they leave this little theme, the band has a frenetic pace. Allen’s snarework here is phenomenal, and Brownstein is slapping quickly, trying desperately to keep up with Magner. Around the 17-minute mark, the band gets noticeably darker as they intensify for the shift toward Svenghali. The Sven peak is well-done. The Sven jam begins with Magner and Allen messing around in a Moshi-Fameus jam. This is pretty solid, as it typically is. Eventually, the rest of the band comes back in and they drop to half-time. They start a pretty cool sounding jam, but unfortunately they drop it fairly quickly to head into Safety Dance. Safety Dance back into Story is pretty meandering and doesn’t do much. Robots is 12 minutes long, which is not promising for a full standalone. The first jam is a few minutes long and has a decent theme to it, but it’s just too short to do much. Ditto for the second jam.

Highlights: Spacebird*, Shimmy*, Moshi-Fameus