March 10, 2018

Both Plan B and Mitts are standard with short type 1 jams that I wouldn’t even really quantify as jams. The Buddha jam immediately gets into a trance assault featuring Allen on e-kick. If you like high-energy trance jams, this is absolutely what you need to be listening to. This is generally solid throughout, and has a healthy array of e-drum sounds from Allen as well. The jam out of Cyclone has a portion that sounds a lot like Funky Town. That’s not really a compliment. The Reactor placement here is odd to me. A 10-minute standalone to end a first set is weird, but okay. In any event, the jam here is pretty mundane as far as Reactors go.

B&C has a very jambandy jam, and doesn’t do a ton for me. I love Rivers, and this jam is not bad, particularly the portion into the ending. The first HDPF jam is about as basic as it can be, and is mercifully only a couple minutes long, considering how boring a lot of these HDPF 1 jams are. The second HDPF jam switches from 3/4 to 4/4 fairly quickly, and most of this 13-minute long jam is forgettable. The last minute or so before they switch to Orch is better, but only marginally. The first Orch Theme jam is pretty solid. This is about as inside the box as it gets, but Brownstein has a great bass groove that he locks into almost immediately, and Barber and Magner follow suit. The second jam begins with, again, some very solid dance jamming. This is still very basic stuff, but the groove is undeniable, and they manage the 4/4 to 3/4 switch very flawlessly. Morph never really gets anywhere too far from its usual slap-heavy jam. I generally like this Shelby encore jam. It’s not too long, but Magner does a lot of nice textural stuff with the Rhodes-y patch early on in the jam, and Barber doesn’t actively take away from the jam. I’ll take it!

Highlights: Buddha*, Rivers, Orch (1,2), Shelby