[Photos by Chris Monaghan]
As the years pass and the number of Umphrey’s McGee shows I attend climbs, my expectations are growing along with them. Somewhat uncontrollably and maybe to my own detriment, I might add. With the amount of mind-boggling shows I’ve seen from this band, it’s tough to live up to that standard each and every show. This isn’t like Radiohead touring once every few years and comparing shows across years — this is seeing a band about ten times a year and comparing across a few months. Maybe I should just stop comparing? Maybe I need to figure out how to release my expectations? Am I getting in the way of my own concert enjoyment?
As someone who thinks (overthinks?) critically about every aspect of my life, music naturally gets chewed over by my brain whether I like it or not. Whenever I see Umphrey’s, words and sentences fly through my head, which may or may not be some sort of synesthesia but I don’t think I’m licensed to make that kind of diagnosis. Nonetheless, what I’m rambling towards here, is that no matter how hard I try to shed any expectations about an Umphrey’s McGee live show, it just isn’t going to happen. Which means I’m eventually going to have some negative feelings about an Umphrey’s show. For instance: this show. Hell, with all of the gushing I’ve done over the years it’s about time I put one in the other column.
On a very basic level, this show was just inconsistent, with a few questionable setlist choices and a couple of quite un-Umphrey’s like segments to boot. For what it’s worth there were some absolute gems, but I’ll get to those in a minute. In the first set there were a couple of oddities of note: firstly, the position of “Morning Song.” While getting this song played is a generally cool thing, its highly predictable nature and relative lack of energy, being placed right after a very gentle song like “Kimble,” sucked all the focus out of the room and made the crowd chatter feel as loud as the music. Even more off-putting was what happened during the set-ending “The Floor.” Over the past year they have been regularly opening this song up to breathe with a solid three to four minute improv section. But with this version it seemed like the entire jam was pre-planned, they didn’t find a groove or ‘segue away,’ they started playing this pre-rehearsed thing on a dime, which took all sense of mystery away from this jam. All of the songs are pre-rehearsed enough, the Stews don’t need to be rehearsed too. Taking chances is why I love this band so much, this was the opposite of taking chances.
There was another instance of this in the second set, when, during “August,” they abruptly segued into “Snake Juice” where they usually dive off the deep end into improv-fueled space exploration. Again, griping about a rarity/bust-out like “Snake Juice” isn’t what I’m going for, it’s more that they robbed “August” of what could have been a wild Stew and took a jam segment in a strongly pre-rehearsed direction. And earlier in the second set they pretty much bombed a mashup of Metallica’s “Sad But True” with Gorillaz’ “Clint Eastwood.” It felt like they re-worked this mashup from where it began years ago, and not in a good way. This time around it didn’t seem to click at all, and with Stasik’s vocal section where he mumbled through some nonsense about Xanax, it was a pretty regrettable song choice and execution. But maybe the most disappointing part of the second set was the set-closer “Hurt Bird Bath.” It’s possibly because the last time I heard this song, Halloween 2013 in Milwaukee, might be one of my favorite “HBB”s I’ve heard live. Or maybe it’s just because the second jam went absolutely nowhere after seeming to get ‘set-up’ by the first jam pretty nicely. I’m not sure if they were intentionally trying to take the energy to a lower place, but the song really seemed to fall flat on its face during that second jam. Very uncharacteristic.
All in all I think I ended up with more questions from this show than satisfaction. Nonetheless there were some parts I keep going back to. I mean, I think it’s nearly impossible for Umphrey’s to not have a few choice meats every night. The first set’s monster was the “Much Obliged” that featured a great juxtaposition of relaxed, classic rock-ish guitar parts over the top of Joel’s gently howling Mellotron. Usually he uses it in much darker areas, so it was awesomely mind-bending to hear it in a lighter setting. Somewhere in there Jake started a lick from “The Fuzz,” which was a pretty sick tease on the fly. Then when the jam unfolded to a sneaky Vocal Stew section from Bayliss, the song officially reached top shelf status. This was gorgeous. In the second set, the “Higgins” definitely took the cake. Whereas the first set’s “Floor” had no mystery, this “Higgins” jam was ALL mystery. It started off effervescent, almost not there at all, but in a very good and very psychedelic way. Naturally Myers helped build the song’s energy as the band extremely patiently built around the percussion. They filled in Myers’ structure with gooey, flowing guitar & synth sounds, while Stasik pitched his bass way down to generate a funky & boisterous under-groove. It built to a single, fierce guitar-fueled peak, only to gorgeously drift into the back-half of “Higgins” like it was just written that way from day one. Now that’s that shit I like.
But I think, for my first Umphrey’s review of 2014, I wanna leave on this note… We are extremely lucky to be able to watch somebody as good at their job as Jefferson Waful every time we see this band. It’s just not possible to be any better at one’s job than Waful is at directing a light show. Not only is he more talented than everyone else, he works harder and is more critical of his own work than anyone else. The way he’s progressed his set-up over the years, never really seeming content, always wanting to push the envelope, is what makes this guy such a consummate professional on top of a virtuosic LD. The visual peak of this night was what he managed to do during the “Hurt Bird Bath.” While the band’s playing wasn’t particularly inspiring, Waful was locked the fuck in, and unleashed every trick in his arsenal. All the different gobos, throwing patterns up on the walls and ceiling, but switching between them at a blinding pace in perfect time with the music. Moments of that totally dark stage but with a shower-like downpour of white or yellow that made it feel like a snowstorm. And his newest and maybe best trick yet: when the music got frantic and his vertical towers of moving lights synched up for these wide, sweeping-across-the-crowd movements that made the crowd in the balcony literally gasp. It’s just the coolest goddamn thing, especially when the individual beams are all frantic and unorganized, only to suddenly fall into place in such a massively moving, coordinated attack. I mean, cotDAMN. Jefferson Waful in 2014 is pretty much the 93′-96′ Michael Jordan of light designers. Guess I had to sneak SOME gushing in.