@JMart said:

I really like the "kill me now" bit. Peak Phish is about setting up an expectation for a peak and then side-stepping it or obliterating it entirely. A very disturbing trend in 3.0 (at this point I guess it could be called a law) is those plodding, medium tempo numbers that set up a very lazy peak, followed by another lazy peak. Think 46 Days and Character Zero. THose songs used to shred. Now they're snooze fests. They're boring sex.

And add Kuroda in for the snooze, he hits that white light (which he hits like 5 seconds before the music happens), and its about as cliche as I've ever seen Phish be cliche, which used to be kind of rare. Lazy peaks kind of rule the day now. What would be really cool is for there to be NO peak at all in some of these expected-peak jams and songs. I recall the 6-24-00 Tweezer as being a nearly peak-less jam, it sounded like Trey really wanted to shred some kind of high register notes to signal an end, but it just sounded like more building up to a peak with no payoff. (That's still one of my favorite Tweezers, simply because it's so non-peaky and different.)

I thought Mike was playing weird notes still and I still hear them, like a move up a half step and back down to the root, but I can't tell if Mike's "weird" notes are making the band do much. I know Page used to catch those and Trey would respond vividly, but I can't tell anymore (OP???).