October 23, 2020

There is a brief type 1 jam inside Mulberry’s that I wouldn’t even count as a full jam. The band breaks out into exploratory improvisation and Magner has some great plucky sounds that give a spacey vibe to the music. This turns into a neat little breakbeat jam that I think works pretty well. There’s a jam in Catalyst that doesn’t do much for me. The jam out of Catalyst features Barber using a bunch of his new bells and whistles. This turns into a really cool trance jam, before returning to Mulberry’s. The jam out of Safety Dance is plodding an uninteresting. First HDPF jam is the typical throwaway type 1. The second HDPF jam gets ridiculously weird, with Barber messing around with his new VST capabilities, and it sounds so cool. I don’t think they nail the landing here, but the fact that they’re going for stuff like this is so awesome to me.

The Buddha jam begins dark and brooding, but doesn’t do much for several minutes. After a while, Magner switches to his xylophone-y patch, and the band does some neat textural stuff using Magner and Barber to play off one another. There’s no real theme here, and this is ultimately just a lot of vamping, but it sounds neat. Eventually they add in a second chord, and I think this has some interesting stuff in it. Enough to make me want to re-listen, but not much beyond that. The Cyclone jam has a neat little Blissco theme going on. However, after just a minute or two, the band feels incredibly disjointed to me. It feels like Magner and Allen are on a completely different wavelength than Barber, and Brownstein just sort of seems like he’s just there. They wind up getting into a different segment of this band that is basically Brownstein playing eighth notes while the rest of the band sort of just plays around him. Some may find this “wall of sound” jamming interesting, but I do not. It reminds me a lot of playing music in practice rooms in college where we thought what we were doing was incredible, only to look back and realize it was a few people playing virtually independent of one another. The Memphis first jam features Allen on a bunch of e-drums. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I miss the times when every Memphis first jam was guaranteed to be a bunch of electronic drums and effects from Magner and Allen. This one isn’t great, but I still like the overall vibe it has. Second Memphis jam becomes I-Man in fairly short order. The first and second I-Man choruses are followed by very short “bridge jams” that I won’t even count as full jams. The first I-Man jam gets spacey in just the right way. Barber stays out of the jam entirely for a full minute or so, just let the rest of the band establish atmosphere. When he comes back in, his tone is ethereal. This is a much more tom-heavy jam than I-Man jams often tend to be, and at points this almost feels more like Magellan than I-Man.

Highlights: Mulberry’s, Catalyst*, HDPF (2), Buddha