@FACTSAREUSELESS said:

@raidcehlalred said:

Interesting review. A lot of people will talk about the Gin and the Hood. Feel good about that Hood. If Fish was displeased about that Gin, he exorcised his anger around eight minutes in. Hope people don't take this the wrong way. It's a awesome time to be following the band. But I'll take an even lesser discussed Gin like 7/8/98 over the MB version. The playing deviates more from 'other' jams, and, thus, is more interesting. Perhaps the reflects some of what @FACTSAREUSELESS mentioned; then again, this might not be the case (I do think the band is tight 'in' their jamming).

However, take ten minutes inside the playing here, insert it following some Thursday night Disease, and it's sorta the same. Of course this isn't a bad thing. Like we saw with Nevada and Tweezer, there is a prisoner of the moment effect at work. The Dust - despite its strange start - gets really great. I like what @nichobert has had to say about Farmhouse, so I'll leave that to him. TMWSIY is always welcome, but quite a strange spot. Jersey a few years back was odd; this: odder. Leave it to the band.

They seem to be willing to noodle a bit where before the ripcord would rule the day. I think this may be what you are hearing in terms of "sameness". One of the things I love about Trey is his vision. He is usually a couple steps ahead of most musicians in his thinking. Not reactionary but proactive. And he's very thematic. So I think there are certain musical mechanisms which get employed frequently by the band which signal direction. These mechanisms result in similarities as they explore space.

The other thing to remember is that we're dealing with sound, but in a finite spectrum. There are only so many chords, only so many octaves. The rest is is all manipulation of space in terms of rhythm, pace, whole/half/quarter notes, rests, etc. Major key, minor key, dissonance. Unless they changed instruments all their music sounds pretty much the same to anyone not familiar with the nuance of their style. So it's sort of a dead end argument.

The Gin became great in my view because it didn't quit. The early part of the jam was interesting but, because they didn't give up on it and they let it find legs, it got better and better until it was epic. That's one of things with these jams. They've had some short jams this tour which I think have been superior to anything they've done on the longer, more heralded pieces, but part of the experience as a listener is the journey, so length becomes a factor in enjoyment. It's part of the mystery of exploration.

Totally get what you are saying. I'm sort of considering the manipulation of space you discuss so well. In many ways, the 'quiet' part of this jam reminded me of the IT Dust. The nuance of that style was so much more abrasive and interesting and simply Different from what I had heard before that I was blown away. What emerged from this quiet space was what I hear as sameness. It's cool sameness, don't get me wrong. It's really cool - and in the moment it's: more, more, more, more. But for me it's a model of this era, not altogether different from last year's (I think first set) NYC Gin.

People - invariably - talk about the Went Gin. I understand why anyone would want to be a part of something like that; it doesn't get much better. But this wasn't that. This was, as you succinctly state, a musical sort of passage, with Trey thinking though ideas (here it might be nice for Mike not to be quite so thunderous - or to modulate/shift pitches).

Not sure what you mean, exactly, by dead end argument.

Even some Waste-style playing - extended - would sound cool. Like you I thought it was great - and Trey's run always reminds me of the Went Gin.

Cohesion, and not noodling in that space, I guess is what I'm saying. Or Trey erupting and modulating with more notes. But it was really cool. Some interesting syncopation, too.