May 25, 2018

Let’s Go Crazy is meh. Resurrection’s composition is always so long feeling to me. They could cut half of this and I wouldn’t miss it at all. The Res jam begins with the typical jamfunk, although there’s a humorous portion where the metronome is coming through the mix for some reason. This jam winds up pretty mediocre overall. The Sound One jam, on the other hand, is great. The first few minutes are comprised of a really cool ethereal dance jam. Around 7:30 Magner has a great textural ARP that colors the upper register beautifully. At 9:00 they shift directions and turn this into a more straightforward dance jam. The result is absolutely fantastic. At 10:10 the band does a brief dropout, and when they come back in 4 bars later, this becomes a full-on dance assault. Magner’s ARPs here dance playfully around Barber’s rhythmic guitar, and Brownstein’s bassline perfectly pushes the groove ahead. This is very, very cool. Air Song has a middling jam for the first several minutes, though at the 8-minute mark they switch to a much more dissonant sound. This has a really neat feel to it; almost like an uneven, off-kilter vibe. By 10:00, the whole band is onboard with this odd jam, and I am too. Around 13:00, they shift sounds and start building. By the 17:00 mark, this is a sort of uplifting sound, and they build this into an artificial peak with no real destination in mind. I don’t know that this portion necessarily lands for me, but it’s nice that they’re clearly communicating really well. I noted this as a highlight merely because this was a long piece of improv with some interesting parts, and they took some chances here.

Gosh this Triumph begins with a weird jam. The band is clearly going for some dark, dissonant stuff. But this just does not resonate with me at all, and it feels grossly disjointed. Around the 8:30 mark they get things together a little bit, and it honestly feels for a bit like they might head into Loose Change, as they’re playing a similar progression. They tease a drop into Voices right around the track change. They play a neat little jam before heading to their actual landing spot, Spacebird (including a neat two-bar Shadow tease from Barber). The Spacebird track is nearly 40 minutes long. Awesome. The first jam has a phenomenal groove to it throughout. Nothing incredible, but just a solid dance jam leading back into Spacebird ending. The jam out of Spacebird is awesome. Beginning around the 29-minute mark, they begin a very sick digital jam featuring ARPs from Magner and e-drums from Allen. They manage to get faster and faster here without losing any of the interesting qualities the jam holds. I love it. The Liquid Handcuffs jam is not awful as far as DNB jams go, but by far the best part is when it turns into a Portal intro jam. Portal has a boring type 1 jam in the middle. This is not awful, just I’d rather they were doing something interesting here. Spraypaint has a nice dance jam. No reinventing the wheel going on, but very solid. The peak has a neat little trade off between the Spraypaint and Shimmy endings. The Highwire encore jam is fine.

Highlights: Sound One**, Air Song, SBMC (1, 2**), Spraypaint