October 16, 2020

The first 40 minutes of this show are nearly entirely forgettable. Spraypaint, Voices, and Rocket Science come and go with nearly nothing happening. The last couple minutes of the Rocket Science jam (pre-Confrontation) are phenomenal, as the band gets wonderfully spacey. To be direct, the Confrontation mostly suffers the same fate as the first 40 minutes of the show. There’s nothing here that I find interesting. Playing a 3-4 minute long Ladies should be a criminal offense.

Brownstein and Barber banter a little bit about dancing pods in 2020. The first Crickets jam is frankly the first full jam that I found interesting in this show. Barber and Magner share some neat interplay early on in the jam, and as the band swells toward the louder/faster Crickets peak, Magner relies heavily on the Virus for some fantastic leads, and plays a bombastic solo atop the rest of the band, before handing the baton off to Barber to follow suit. The second jam is nothing if not forgettable. The 4th of July jam is a long, winding jam that makes me think of all those jambands that think they sound like jazz bands sometimes. This is not at all interesting to me, but if you like more of the “Phish” style of jamming, you may be interested in this. Spacebird’s 8-bar cadence lasts way too long into this jam, and as the band hastens toward Above the Waves, Brownstein oddly lands on the Kamaole Sands bassline before a somewhat unexpected and uncomfortable shift to minor. The jam out of Waves back into Spacebird is also weirdly haunted by this Kamaole-esque sound. A Shelby encore with just a 3-minute jam prior to the peak feels rude.

Highlights: Rocket Science*, Crickets (1)