December 26, 2014

Barfly is standard. KOTW has an intense breakbeat jam, but I’m not sure how much of this has anything interesting going on. For the most part, it feels like everybody playing faster, faster, and faster, but without a ton of thought behind it. Meh. Not for me. Rock Candy has a phenomenal jam in it featuring some absolutely wonderful leadwork from Magner. The Bombs jam takes off with Allen dropping the e-kick early on. Magner has this great 2-bar riff that sets the early tone here. They get into this weird “you don’t win friends with salad” jam that I think falls flat. The last several minutes are a long “Fanfare” intro jam that is just okay. Don is forgettable.

Caterpillar is very long, but it doesn’t feel like any of this warrants any re-listening. Not a whole lot going on here that is worthwhile to me. The Minions jam has a couple parts that I really enjoyed, mostly from Magner. I noted this as a highlight, but I’d say it just barely reaches the threshold I’d require for such a designation. TVM 1 is a very short type 1 jam that is instantly forgettable. The second TVM jam is not much better, although interestingly at the 16:40 mark, Brownstein is very clearly playing the Miracles bassline 3 years before it would debut. Shem Rah is disappointing. The jam itself sounds absolutely awesome. However, they end this way, way, way too soon and jump into Shadow. As much as I love Shadow, would have loved to have heard where that was going. There’s essentially a short “middle” jam in Shadow. This is…fine. Never really feels like they get out of the actual song that much. The jam out of Shadow feels like The Champions from the very beginning. I actually thought this was like a fakeout when I first listened to this, only to learn that they didn’t even debut The Champions for two years after this. Weird. Standard Hope encore.

Highlights: Rock Candy**, Bombs, Minions, Shadow