Overall a great show. great crowd (especially compared to saturday) Great weather! instead of the expected rain we got a constant cool breeze all night long.

first set. lots of great type I versions. SAND opener was a good sign. WINTER QUEEN quickly mellowed things… but REBA, BIRDS and WATER got the energy back on track pretty quick

trey lost it a little in the composed part of REBA and didn’t really get it back, but the jam itself is well played. In this reba and in most of the show, fishman is the mvp... i think the small set is getting him to do more with less... especially on the snare drum. whistling ending was nice.

POSSUM got the crowd very pumped... and JIM got me very pumped. and i always love BOUNCING. MAZE is always kinda boring to me. but overall everything in this set was very well played, with the exception of a rough patch in reba.

MELT deserves conversation. it quickly drifts into quasi space funk territory. page doing some very dissonant piano comping, and trey doing lots of staccato delay infused stuff, while mike and fish get into some rhythmic adventures. at 8:05 they drift closer to a more inside approach. then at about 9:00 trey starts whammying, and it works great in this section... lots of fills from fishman while mike lays back while it bills. builds with some wooing along with the whale (by trey? definitely not the crowd) then gets to some weird places, treys new tape delay is put to good use... than at 11:00 minutes it begins to journey home to the melt groove. overall great version. i think i prefer the new years version still but this melt and the nye version both show that this song is finally heading back in the right direction.

set break...

CDT. a monster. but is it as good as everyone says? does length alone = epic? these are the questions at hand.
starts with typical cdt jamming and then
5:20 - modulates from Em to D major.
6:40 - mike and trey start playing D to Em back and fourth. very happy section ensues.
8:10 - drops down a bit, but fishman keeps the groove pumping. slowly drifts to a lull and then into a more tribal beat from fishman and some plinko stuff happens around 9:15.
9:50 - trey starts using an interesting scale, mixolydian with a flat 6th (gives us some cool harmonic major lines) building tension.
10:40 - the first spot i was worried about a possibly abortion... and i think the whole band may have been thinking it too. but as the jam fades to nothing trey just rips a nice rocking line in F# minor and the funk continues. this time dark and pulsing. they are really locked at this point. page and trey start using other effects and the space journey begins.
12:30 - definitely in F# mixolydian now. trey keeps alternating between some soloing and strumming a little line. F#sus resolving to F#.
14:00 (about) - turns into Emajor F#major chord progression. reminiscent of where the jam started.
14:40 - trey starts playing a chord progression that is just like the mikes song build up but resolves to a major instead of minor D - E - F# all major chords... right at the end of this i hear trey start to tease norwegian would but then he doesnt...
15:30 - page starts playing a rhythm that trey picks up on this builds to probably the best part of the jam... page gets damn funky and mike takes it to another place harmonically... although for a while the key center is not really defined. eventually it lands in a quasi Ebmajor with some #5s and b5s. page playing an acceding chromatic line (5th, #5, 6, b7) very cool. trey keeps trying to pull it back to standard noodling at times... but the rest of the band keeps him in check... its not time to run through all your signature licks yet, trey...
19:40 - things start to pick up... then drop way down and get a little weird with trey whammying some space noises. eventually goes to a little repeating line b5-5-root in Eb... starts to build
21:50 - was sure trey was going to pull the rip chord on this at this point... but then page and mike and fish all start to get into something pretty cool... so trey just starts putting some sound fx ontop of it... pretty cool.
24:00 - quite. serene. floating in outer space. another big synth drop. pulsing with background ambiance. eventually lands in C#major (kind of) and ends naturally.

amazing. my only complaint about some of the longer jams is that they never come back up... the last 15 minutes is just a long fade out. theres lots of great stuff to enjoy during that fade out... but coming back up to a peak out of that would have really done it for me… to answer our important questions… yes it is as good as everyone says and in this case the length makes it happen. i would also like to mention that i felt about 3 drops of rain during cdt.

LIGHT. always reminds me of 2009. and this is probably my favorite jam of the night. and just like CDT it very quickly begins to drift from the typical light formula... 5:30 begins modulation to Bmin and by 6:00 we are in Bmin... which very quickly modulates to the relative major (D) and 6:41 we don't just get a tease of St Thomas, trey plays the whole melody. very nice. some unsure playing in there for a minute, figuring things out, some back and fourth key change ideas between page and trey trading lines. at 8:20 mike plays the dear prudence progression and trey and page immediately jump on it... and awesomeness ohhh yeah... HEY .NET! "DEAR PRUDENCE JAM" NEEDS TO BE MENTIONED IN THE SET LIST FOR THIS SHOW! or at least dear prudence tease by the entire band. its quite for a while but at 9:55 trey hits it hard and it goes back to the light pulse. trey starts hammer pulling like crazy... highlight of the show. then back into the dear prudence thing full on. DAMN! possibly best single song of the tour thus far.

TWEEZER was nice… very tweezery. the jam starts with some deep wah from trey reminiscent of some character zero solos… 6:45, fish has a quick metric modulation to a slow 6/8 feel. back and forth to that a couple of times… i kind of wish they ran with that and took it to a totally different place but whatever trey kept pulling it back to standard tweefunk. at 8:00 minutes we land hard in D major and trey play somethings that remind of segments of the transitions during tweezeppelin. at 9:22 a strong down beat groove with a standard trey chord idea builds and continues to build to a peak at about 12:55. very enjoyable this segment reminds me of a gin jam. and at 14:19 it hits hard again. really nice. ends with the tweezer theme gradually slowing down.

WADING was a nice break after all that. and MONICA is fun… i don’t dislike it as much as i did before i saw it live.

SLAVE was a great end to the set. not much more to say. trey nails the peak.
encore.
BDTNL has grown on my over the years…
TWEEPRISE obviously a great end.

and seriously .net lets get some kind of mention of the dear prudence tease/jam in light. it deserves a mention.