September 23, 2017

The Caterpillar jam is meandering for quite a while. However, around the 11-minute mark the band shifts significantly toward more major key, Blissco territory. This is very neat, and I like it a lot. Most of the Don jam is mediocre, until near the end when they develop a pretty little theme to head into Humu. Most of the Humu jam does nothing for me. The Resurrection jam comes out of a unique spot for this one, and there are parts that sound like Marc is trying to get into Bombs. This is dark and a little creepy, and it works well here. Unfortunately, this is ditched in fairly short order to head toward HAB.

Neither the opening Dribble jam nor the jam out here do much for me. The jam out is more of a “rocky” jam, and Barber is in shred mode for part of this, which I don’t really care about. I-Man has a short, straightforward type 1 jam after verse 1. I almost always could do without these. Second jam is the same. Third jam has a very long, if meandering and uninteresting, jam. Rock Candy is more of the same, and this is pretty obviously the I-Man return from the start. Last I-Man jam is not bad as far as I-Man endings go, but pretty predictable. The one neat thing here is Magner’s Dark Star tease. I’m not a TGD fan by any means, but I’ve always enjoyed Dark Star, and this was a cool little thing. Barber joins into the tease as well. Neat. As dumb as this may sound to a non-jamband fan, a 12-minute Jigsaw is just not long enough to be interesting. Both jams are short and forgettable. The Helix jam is basically the band teasing/playing a dance version of Solstice, which is neat. Brownstein leaves this theme and develops a cool 4-chord progression that Magner and Barber dance around in a pleasing way. This is nothing insane, but it’s a very solid encore.

Highlights: Caterpillar*, Helix