Portland's always lucky when the Slip come to town, and this weekend was no exception. Please excuse the length, I'm still trying to digest it all.
BAM showed Reed College once again what it means to ROCK the Student Union on Saturday. Despite some mix-ups with security and timing issues, the show went off well with a HOT set from the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey to open things up. Unfortunately, JFJO took off after their set so we didn't get any of the intermingling we had hoped for.
The Slip has been playing a lot of new songs, and the only ones I could name from Saturday were The Earth..., Get Me With Fuji, Before You Were Born, and Yellow Medicine. There were a bunch of new songs in there that I had never heard before, or had only heard once or twice. Andrew was playing with the digital delay loop with his beatbox break in Fuji, laying polyrhythms on tope of it for a while. The Before You Were Born had more teeth than in the past, with Brad playing the electric, a nice development in this young song's life. Overall the playing was solid and energetic, and the modestly sized crowd was really into it. But the bottom fell out of the entire show with the Dogs on Bikes encore that kept going and going and going, as the best Dogs do. They were mixing it up like crazy, and at one time they slowed it down to about quarter time, and shouts of disbelief and awe echoed through the wooden rafters. Remarkable what those three can do with a rockin' song like Dogs. In short, Andrew was an animal as usual, and Marc ripped it up (particularly on Dogs).
Goodfoot Lounge, Portland, OR 8.31.03 Set I: ? Instrumental, Rainmaker?, ? Jerky funk tune, Headshot?, Joe Higley Set II: Phase One>Drums> Jazz piano, Weight of Soloman, Children of December, Spice Groove, Rhythm and Gold E: If One of Us Should Fall, What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding? (Elvis Costello song)
Last night at the Goodfoot was two sets of Slip after the Greyboy Allstars played across town. The Goodfoot is a smaller venue than they usually play in Portland, and they filled it up for the first set. Packed and sweaty, people were getting down to mostly new stuff that I didn't know for the first set which closed with Joe Higley. They also played Headshot, which is on the NEW LIVE ALBUM!! called Alivelectric, but I'm not sure exactly where in the set. Another tune was a new, thick funk tune with a sort of halting, jerky rhythm, and there was also a song Brad was singing that may be called Rainmaker. This one was pretty fast with Brad belting out lines with a relentless rhythmic roll coming from Andrew. There was some line about two bodies making love in a tunderhead that caught my ear.
They came out for the second set with Phase One, definitely one of my favorite old tunes that I think I've only seen them play twice before. This one was more of the melodic jazz style, lacking in the balls out power that some other versions have, but still great to hear though it wasn't quite finished. Andrew took the reigns with a drum break that opened into a piano instrumental I'd heard before (maybe the one Brad wrote or else some jazz standard whose name I can't find right now). Brad stayed at the keys for Weight of Soloman, always a favorite for me!
After the Weight was another newer vocal song called Children of December. Like Rainmaker, this one's also a departure from the Dear Milena/74/Before You Were Born singer-songwriter style. As Live said, it was like Brad was singing this one to a girl. Spice Groove followed with an intense build-up that didn't really drop, but eased down into the body of the song. They are still thowing down the hip hop jam in the middle of this one, though Brad put the syncopated strumming on the delay loop and made some more trippy sounds on top. Later in the jam, Andrew tapped into his looping machine, giving it a pretty rigid, almost trancy groove, but the loops melted away and BAM stood up to bear their teeth again in full splendor.
At the opening of Rhythm and Gold, when Brad is just fooling around on the guitar with the bluesy line all quietly, someone shouted and Brad started just shredding. Marc and Andrew followed suit, and the ususally mellow intro turned into a rockin' stomp! Almost to make up for it, the parts around the lyrics turned out to be much mellower than usual. It was a good If One Of Us Should Fall, and Brad literally collapsed and played a solo from his back on the gound. The What's So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding? really capped the night off in all of its 80s charm, much more than usual. Brad was blantantly playing the lead of Sorry repeatedly at the end of the final song, almost apologizing for the lower energy than the night before.
A few things I noticed after not seeing the Slip all summer was that they are using the loops a lot more, though they are going about it very subtlely and tastefully. With the Goodfoot show, they seemedt o be making a conscious effort not to do the same things with their songs than they've done in the past, a hard thing to do when you know that much of what you've done in the past has worked so well. But they're never satisfied with that and keep on pushing. And that's why we keep coming back for more.
Peace and see you tonight in Eugene!
Adam
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