January 12, 2018

Shem-Rah has a nice dance jam in it. Barber has a few lines here that go great with Magner, and I like Brownstein’s main bassline a lot. There’s nothing too novel going on here, but it’s overall enjoyable. The Overture jam is multithematic, and has three distinct sections. The only problem is that the first two are incredibly mundane. Around the 16-minute mark, the band switches to an uptempo dance jam, but prior to that there are 10 full minutes of boring DNB and later a downtempo section. The jam back into the end of SRB has a few minutes of interesting stuff, but by and large this is filler. The first Boop jam is similarly pretty boring, and they absolutely botch the return to Boop. The second Boop jam is the usual “blues funk” that the band simply isn’t any good at anymore. This is not interesting.

The beginning of Morph is the pretty typical funk jam, although they hit a neat major key jam for part of this. This is Blissco-y, but not amazing. Around the 12-13 minute mark, they switch to a dance jam for the Abraxas jam. I think this dance part, combined with the major key portion, makes this something I’d relisten to, but not necessarily amazing by any means. The jam in Abraxas is pretty well-worn territory. The jam out of Rock Candy on the other hand is great. This is tight dance jamming, and the entire band is on the same page. Really nice stuff. The Cyclone jam doesn’t do much for me. The first several minutes of the Waves jam are pretty typical, followed by a less interesting downtempo jam. Around the 18-minute mark, they land on a midtempo dance jam that starts with a nice feels with a lot of space. This winds up being pretty solid, even if the ending of Morph becomes fairly predictable. Bazaar is standard.

Highlights: Shem-Rah, Morph, Rock Candy*, Waves