Summer 2010 keeps going strong with the third show of the tour. Where 6/11 was a solid show with a few big highlights and 6/12 was an uneven but mostly-solid show with a few monster highlights, 6/13 comes across as the most consistent yet, but with no real central jam or highlight to latch on to. All in all, it's been a fun run so far, and a great change of pace from the drudgery of many of the fall '09 shows. Each show has been a little different, all have had their good points...but, that said, I'd by lying if I wasn't always hoping for the next show to be that show, you know? But then, I guess if I didn't feel that way all the time, I wouldn't have committed myself to reviewing hundreds of Phish shows in my spare time in the first place...
The show opens with a heaping helping of whale, as might be expected. It sort of mars what would have otherwise been a nice "Jibboo" opener mini-jam, but then Trey employs it to interesting, tension-y effect on the following "Chalkdust." "Fluffhead" is in the three-spot, and played at an extra-fast clip, and then everyone nails "Funky Bitch." There's a nice interlude featuring Mike and Page playing off one another, then a full-on shred from Trey that covers a lot of ground in ninety or so seconds to end the song.
The "Jim" > "NICU" > "Horn" portion of the set continues with great song selection, but there's not really anything to dig into here. "It's Ice" is similar to "Fluffhead" in that it's a fast-tempo version but is otherwise standard, save for a bit of neat haunted-house piano from Page during the interlude. "Bouncin'" and "Sparkle" set up a "Melt" that's mostly like the "Jibboo" opener: standard Type I solo plus whale pedal. However, around the 8:00 mark Page and Fish start trying to push things into a weirder space, and they finally succeed about a minute later, setting up some interesting whale-plus-loop moments that don't last nearly long enough before the song returns to the main riff. End set.
Set two opens with "Drowned," and Fish trying to pound through his drums, or at least that's how it sounds. Much like the "Melt" jam, this one stays on the rails for the most part, though this time it's Mike who's clearly trying to do something different. In the final few minutes, though, the band makes two quick transitions: first, there's a point where Fish starts playing some "tribal" sounding drum beats while Trey solos softly and melodically over them, and then shortly after they transition into what I'm currently calling "space shuffle." Both of these spaces are really interesting and probably warrant a lot more exploration than they get, because shortly after the second one starts, there's a sudden > "Tweezer."
The "Tweezer," like a few of the jammier songs in this show, has some interesting moments, but they don't really coalesce into one coherent jam. After the composed part here, the band immediately goes into some deep, dark, almost-ambient space a lot like the end to 6/12's "Number Line." Unfortunately, this only lasts for a brief time before Trey defaults into the typical Type I rock "Tweezer" mode. This lasts for most of the body of the song, while the very end features ye olde '09 ambient fadeout into "Twist."
Everybody takes a minimalist approach to this "Twist" except for Mike, who slams away pretty much alone, stringing together fusillades of bass-bombs while everything else stays in the background. It's an interesting experiment in contrast. "Piper" is yet another song in this show that takes almost its entire running time to get to an interesting jam space, which is then cut off before it can really develop, this time > "Free."
We wrap up, more or less, with a whale-laden "Wading" solo and a fast-tempo "YEM" featuring a particularly intense rock peak from Trey, but not much else to speak of.
So, another solid outing here, and the "Drowned" > "Tweezer" -> "Twist" > "Piper" is a solid string of segues, though, again, all parts of it are kept from being really exceptional by the fact that the segues seem to keep coming right when things are about to get interesting.
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