This week’s #ThisDealInHistory is another look into our 2002 concert in London, Ontario.
Last week i discussed the restraint and patience displayed in our house grooves. This week’s cut begins with another example of that same restraint and composure, however it’s in a downtempo style.
Slower grooves played a big part in the 1998-2003 shows (they’re heavily featured throughout our first concert/record “This Is Live”) and this opening jam is a good illustration of our early-era downtempo style, albeit with the heavier approach that we began exploring in late 2001/early 2002. This shift stemmed from our desire to inject some heft and body into our sound as well as to veer our tone away from the more delicate rhythms and sounds so prevalent in our first three years.
Around this time these slower pieces began to feature repeated chord progressions and melodic lines, a definite development from our one-chord approach in the early years. This enabled us to further develop our song-creation chops and not simply rely on jamming on the groove for extended periods of time.
Around 3:30 we shift gears and bring up the tempo, following with harmonic changes at both 4:10 and 4:38 to lead us into an early version of “G-nome”.
“G-nome” was written on the fly at one of our 2002 Bowery Ballroom shows in NYC (its creation is documented on our Live: NYC 5/31+6/1 2002 release) and the song was still developing at this time (in fact, it continued to develop its basic body until around 2005!). In this clip you can hear us extending the intro and throwing different concepts into the mix, some of which would return over time in future shows, some of which would be thrown to the side - such is the way we write songs!
After three minutes of exploring the intro we finally hit the main head at 7:00. The astute listener will notice that in these early instances we only play the head once and go to an organ interlude before returning to the main melody for a second time (without the shots and stops that eventually found their way into the melody).
The jam at 9:00 is of a distinctly different nature as well - no key change, the same synth sound - but these ideas changed over time and performances. We would listen back to these shows, pick out bits we liked, discard ones that we didn’t like, and then try to remember them, all the while working on creating new bits to incorporate into the piece. Most tND songs were works in progress for a fairly long period time before they settled into any conceptual consistency.
Shout-out to Dan’s bass tone from 11:21 to the end. It veers from crispy and insect-like to downright dirty! -Jamie
