The band played very well; the rhythm section was locked in from the jump. Marc Brownstein’s thudding, hypnotic bass and Aron Magner’s space-age science-fiction keyboard sounds were as tightly woven in as it gets with the hot percussive fire of Aucoin’s drum kit. Barber, playing on what would be assumed to be a borrowed hot-rod red Fender Telecaster was having some tonal issues. There were moments, mostly when he was subdued and patiently building spacious, searing lead licks, that he echoed David Gilmour; those moments sounded great. There were others when it seemed he was overplaying to compensate for the fact that nothing sounds as good as his Gibson.
The improvisation all night was just as you’d expect; as spacey and psychedelic as the Disco Biscuits get. The loose, funky jam into On Time showed spectacular interplay between Brownstein and Magner, with flashes of brilliance from Barber. The now-familiar dark, fuzzy bass groove pushed the fairly boring jam into Bombs, but one of the best moments of the show came out of this tune in the form of a soulful disco-house jam led by Magner, with Barber shredding tasteful leads and the drums and bass keeping it all in the pocket.
It took the band noodling around for quite a while after that brief moment of transcendence before they took it down a notch and let Allen steal the show. With great care, Aucoin helped build the drum-and-bass backbone of the monstrous ending peak during an inverted Portal To An Empty Head from a sparse, down tempo broken-beat jam before they ended the tune and inverted it.
Barber started playing the Papercut chords right after they finished the beginning of Portal. The improv from this point forward in the set seemed lacking, and never quite materialized into anything substantial. There were efforts made, but nothing took off, besides maybe Barber’s shoes, and subsequently him climbing onto the speaker towers mid-song to shred during a textbook, predictable Cyclone.
The setlist stayed interesting however, with songs like Caterpillar benefiting from the Tractorbeam treatment and sounding far more appealing to the ears than usual. Sweating Bullets was a good choice here, and they kept with the theme of the show by continuing to play new songs segueing into Feeling Twisted before closing the set with the end of Spraypaint. Neck Romancer in the encore was well placed, with a fun, funky jam to close out the evening’s festivities and sent this motley gang of beat junkies down the canyon back to wherever it was that they came from. Whether any of them will return to the Mishawaka in any reasonable time frame remains to be seen; the question of whether or not the place went out with a bang, however, is simply not up for debate.
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