August 19, 2016

This show begins with a 30-minute Grass is Green. Sweet. I like the idea, but the execution is…okay. The first 10 minutes or so go by without anything really notable happening. This is mostly just treading water, with the exception of a big Spacebird fakeout. Most of this jam is not great. The last 4-5 minutes are decent, but I feel like that doesn’t really make up for the last 25 minutes of nothing. The Bridge is a cool song. The Ladies jam is generally okay, but nothing here that really made me sit up and pay attention.

Mitts is standard. The 7-11 jam goes straight to the trance jam, and they hit some nice fast, dark stuff. This sounds like a thousand other 7-11 jams, but I’m not necessarily up in arms about that. The Munchkin jam is similarly dark and features a good amount of e-drums, which I’m all for. Magner has some nice delayed arp patches that he throws in to bounce off of Barber’s guitar playing here, and I think while Marc drops the Orch bassline far too early, this works regardless. First Orch jam is way too short to be memorable in any way. Second jam is alright, but the Champions transition can be seen a million miles away. The Champions has a very Magner-centric jam in it that hits me in the exact right places. The echo-y arps that Magner uses here provide this really unique feel to the jam, even if Brownstein and Barber don’t seem all that interested in joining him on the journey he’s taking. Around the 10-minute mark, Brownstein joins in, and this gets kicked up another notch or two. Floes is very long, but I don’t feel like they do a lot here. City encore is standard.

Highlights: 7-11, Munchkin, Champions*