May 24, 2019

This show is solid, the main highlight is the seriously catchy riff that starts about 10m into Abraxas & has a hypnotic groove until at 13:25 the melody just takes over for the next 3 1/2 minutes & to my ears is fantastic. Not sure how anyone could call this a forgettable jam b/c this is just great. Best part of the 1st set out of a strong Abraxas. 2nd set is excellent as well, w/ the band taking Lunar Pursuit out for an extended space odyssey that’s over 30min sandwiched between LBB. The Champions is played very well & > into 1 of the best early jammed out Clocks. Morph encore is stellar. Overall another great show at the Ogden.

Story starts the show with a mediocre midtempo funk jam that is treading well-worn territory. Shem-Rah’s jam begins with the Rocket Science/Brain Surgery jam that permeates most of 2019 SRB jams. By the time they finish with it, they have little to say prior to jumping into the Abraxas intro jam. The Abraxas jam doesn’t have much that’s interesting to say, and they AGAIN jump into a Rocket Science jam. After they get out of it, the rest of the jam is pretty meh. The initial Boop jam jumps almost immediately into a 4-chord progression, but it feels a little forced. I didn’t get much out of this, but about 10 minutes into the jam, they get into this weird feeling jam with Barber playing this hypnotic rhythm over and over again. It feels like this could build to some great major key stuff, but Marc shifts them dramatically to a minor key and things normalize a bit. Missed opportunity to get a little weird. The Lunar Pursuit jam begins with them dropping things to a half-time dub jam. That’s not all that interesting. However, they eventually pick up the pace, and Marc hits on a simple-but-fantastic two-chord progression that reminds me a bit of the 10/26/07 HAB (one of my favorites). This is not nearly on the same level, but it’s a great little piece of music nonetheless. Then immediately after this, they drop into an ambient jam. Awesome! They wind up building out of this, and drop back down to half-time again. Even if this segment isn’t all great (much of it is), I’m just happy they allowed themselves this much time to just stretch their legs. The jam out of Boop is mediocre funk. The jam out of Champions starts to get neat near the end of it, but I don’t feel it develops enough. Sample (Clocks) doesn’t do a whole lot either, and suddenly we hit Story ending out of nowhere. Meh. With that said, the Morph encore has some great playing from Barber and Brownstein. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but a very solid Morph encore.

Highlights: Lunar, Morph