April 21, 2016

While Treemaculate summed up this show pretty well, I disagree about Let’s Go Crazy. It’s fun and much more creative than many of the other covers that tend to show up from the Set Break period. The only part I wasn’t all that in love with was the drop to a lower tempo toward the end of the jam, which sounded a little too much like any old anonymous sloppy jam band. Magner tries to save it with some fun melodica riffs, but it’s a bit of a tortured mess by the time it lands in Munchkin Invasion. The Munchkin jam is pleasant, if largely unremarkable: Magner lays down some twinkling, descending arpeggios while Barber feels around. The return into the Munchkin peak/theme is unfortunately a disaster entirely of Barber’s doing: out of tune and out of time. The first, brief KOTW jam is Barber sounding like shit on purpose, and it actually works; he and Magner both make fried, discordant noises before scaling back into the theme. The following jam hovers in Type 1 territory for a good period of time, but in a pleasing way. When Magner switches over from organ to synth lead, the proceedings get much spicier. Allen seizes the opportunity, instituting a driving beat that Barber briefly takes advantage of before downshifting into textural noises. As Treemaculate noted, this is a real shame even if the spacier, more textured portion of the jam eventually winds up somewhere interesting with Magner pushing Barber into the background.

The Voices/I-Man switcheroo wouldn’t be so bad if Barber was in tune, which he again aggressively is not. Magner has such a heavy hand playing lead lines on piano that he must’ve realized it was up to him to right the ship. It works this time, as eventually Barber starts playing some tamer, gentler, bending rhythmic lines to shore him up. It almost sounds like Steve Kimock at moments. Barbs once again butchers the landing into Voices. The Voices jam takes a while to cohere, but it’s great when it does: Magner and Barber exchange discordant riffs while Brownie and Allen hold it together. Magner sounds like he’s playing 5 different synths at once by the time the Tricycle transition occurs. There’s a lot of cool percussion from Allen in the Trike jam that I love and wish we got more of elsewhere. Barber once again flails a bit until Brownie comes in with a new guiding bassline. The next four minutes of transition back into Voices and then into I-Man are excruciating, some of the worst transitions I’ve ever heard them do. The final I-Man jam is mostly paint-by-numbers Blissco, but it’s not unwelcome especially compared to the disaster leading up to it. The encore SOTW jam is pretty standard, but the jamfunk stuff is also pretty welcome after the humongous missteps of the second set. At least Barber sounds moderately engaged.

As you can surmise, Barber was out of it more often than not on this excursion. The rest of the guys, Magner in particular, do their best to salvage the jams. Sometimes it’s good enough, other times not so much. Overall, I can’t see myself revisiting even the better moments of this show because of how bad the bad ones are. 2.5.

Let’s Go Crazy is meh. Munchkin starts out with a great little synth line from Magner. While he drops the synth line itself, he replaces it with this sort of carnival sounding arp, and Barber builds his chord melody around this arp. This turns into a nice jam with some solid communication between the members of the band. Weirdly, the Munchkin peak just comes from nowhere, which is pretty impatient on their part (mostly Barber). King of the World is essentially the same story. The band develops a nice jam, particularly the section around 11:02 where Barber develops this really slick little riff. However, despite building up a nice theme, they again just sort of force themselves into the Basis ending. Eh. Mitts is standard.

I can’t stand when they do this stuff they do in the second set. The composition of Voices goes directly into the composition of I-Man, which is just a waste. The first 3 jams in I-Man are each too short to be interesting. The one saving grace here is that Barber’s tone is beautiful, and just perfect. Wish he would use this all the time. The jam out of Voices into Tricycle doesn’t do anything for me, and they spend way too much time on themes that aren’t really interesting. The jam out of Tricycle is far too noodly and all over the place, and there is literally no jam out of Voices back into I-Man. Sigh. The Story encore is (shockingly) 9 minutes of generic jam-funk. Yay.

Highlights: Munchkin*, KOTW*