, attached to 2009-11-18

Review by waxbanks

waxbanks Standout versions of 46 Days and DWD are reason enough to seek this one out. 46 Days is less driven than the year's-best Merriweather summer rendition; the boys just let their hair down a little and play some spare sci-fi cow-funk grooves for a few minutes, keeping the rhythms going past the point when a typical summer jam would've dissolved into ambient space. Sounds like the Halloween-weekend breakthroughs are paying dividends in fall too.

Meanwhile the Disease is a culminating 2009 version, paying off Trey's yearlong experiment with seemingly out-of-place flatted ninths and minor modes in the middle of soaring major-chord jams. The last couple minutes of this version see the whole band get with him for some woolly eastern-modal fun. Then there's a wonderfully dense, dissonant Taste waiting on the other side of a now-typical Gordon-centric Free. (Will someone please remind Trey that it's perfectly OK to segue directly into that glorious Free riff as in days of old, instead of stopping the momentum with his rhythmic chopping?) As for the climactic Mike's Groove, it doesn't matter. It's Mike's Groove for god's sake. If you're the sort of person who reads these reviews, you'll like it just fine! It's a swell performance anyhow, though I find it difficult to get too fired up about this Weekapaug.

Still waiting on that inevitable universe-destroying version of Stealing Time, but there are worse things than waiting.


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