November 16, 2019

7-11 is always a fun opener from a compositional standpoint. Hearing that rock riff to start the show feels like the band’s way of saying, “Get out of our way, we’re going to destroy everything in sight.” Obviously that’s not always what happens, but I love it as a tone-setter. The type 1 jams are fine, but they hit on a great little groove in the main trance jam, with Brownstein setting up the chord changes. Amen is fine. The Caterpillar jam is not necessarily bad, but it feels awkwardly slow. Like the pace just does not feel right; they should be 10-20 BPM faster. In any event, they slide into Hero, which I am not familiar enough with yet to conclusively determine the transition officially occurs. The jam out of Hero suffers the same fate as the Caterpillar jam. It just feels a little. Too. Slow. This is not to say slow is always bad, but here it just feels like it’s dragging. The Dribble jam doesn’t do much for me, although the segue into Buddha is well done. Buddha’s jam starts out dark and digital and winds up pretty neat. All of the I-Man jams don’t really stray far enough from I-Man itself to really be memorable. It’s odd seeing a track time of 19:15 and still not feeling as though the jams had a chance to breathe. The Helix jam has some really great stuff in it around the 7-minute mark. Magner has a great melody and Marc follows him with a nice chord change. They change things up and mellow out a little bit, and what results is a really nice jam. Nothing earth-shattering, but great communication amongst the band. The pre-Tractorbeam jam is neat, but the jam out into Anthem is nonexistent. The Anthem jam takes a little longer to get going than I’d like, but eventually settles in to Champions. I think Champions > Tricycle suffers from the same thing that a lot of Tricycle’s suffer from, which is that the segue feels a little forced. Like suddenly they’re just playing Tricycle. The jam from Tricycle back to Helix is fine, but nothing noteworthy. The City is a fine encore.

Highlights: 7-11, Buddha, Helix