, attached to 2019-06-23

Review by Laudanum

Laudanum So, a few words about this second set. While likely not an all-timer, it is nevertheless very, very good and quite representative of what they've been up to so far this tour.

The first 45 minutes are one long jam sequence, with callbacks to the opening Crosseyed in the subsequent Everything's Right and shiny-new Ruby Waves. Anyone with an interest in 3.0 is probably familiar with the Crosseyed sets by now, but this one has a wrinkle or two. Here, the 'still waiting' line is sung over two polyphonic grooves that eschew the typical rock peaks for loping, skipping beats and airy, even happy, playing.

When the Crosseyed motif shows up a third time in Twist, it's at a point where the band has dropped to near silence in a breakdown of the familiar Twist jam, encouraging (without urging) the crowd to sing along, and when they do it involves them directly in the creative process in a way that the recent woo breaks have not.

The effect, then, of hearing the Crosseyed motif re-purposed and presented in multiple ways is sort of like watching an origami master folding shapes. See this crane? Now it's a fox. Now it's a squirrel.

Combine this style of playing with Trey's interview quotes referencing jambands needing to move beyond the '70's, and maybe we can catch of a glimpse of where they're heading this year, i.e. an aesthetic focused on the new, whether that be songs themselves or former jamming styles deconstructed and rebuilt. A listen to some of the other jams of the tour (Blossom Birds, Charlotte Jim) give credence to this theory, but who knows? The sheer unpredictability of 1.0 is back, with changes from tour to tour and even show to show. As phans, that's something we should all be celebrating.


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