# 8/11/21 deer creek (N1) review

(reviewed to order, for @n00b100)

I've nothing much to say about Set I, I'm afraid; it's Ideal First Set Summer Phish, No Big Jams Edition, and up to the usual standard of effortless excellence. The banter before 'Cool Amber' is charming (as is the moment where Page apparently forgets what key 'Water in the Sky' is in), and 'Halfway to the Moon' is one of the best tracks on Fuego -- along with 'Waiting All Night' and '555,' baby!! -- but it's just the kind of set with a solid eight-minute 'Theme' and a crushing trill-filled 'Fluffhead' and that's fine with me, y'know? The kind of set where I'd have loved every minute of being there but will never feel the need to listen closely. I'm middle-aged, life is more like that than it was.

The second set's another matter.

I've already effused about the sublime Friday and Sunday Deer Creek shows -- the former a psychedelic detonation, the latter an old-school medley -- and don't wish to go on about how Everything's Right yadda yadda...the usual asterisks are in place next to any account of 2021 Phish. But this second set beats both those heavy hitters for cohesion, sustained deep colours, continuous texture, overall power. It's got one of the summer's most perfect segues (Ghost > Gin) and its wildest closer (Split), along with its longest unbroken improvisatory contour -- for my money it's the closest we've come this year to a Fall 1997-style Dark Carnival, coming from a totally place than (say) 11/26/97 but converging phenotypically somehow...

By which I mean:

The MrC jam starts out friendly but shares the song's own disconcerting major/minor internal tension, the way Trey's descending guitar line plays against its ironic-celebratory refrain, with Copeland/Fish's carpet-yanking hi-hat pattern circling around to interfere whenever the midtempo lope gets too easygoing. Mike's bass drone lets up and the whole band gets spacey -- Phish keeps returning to this dissociative-Epcot vibe and I'm extremely here for it -- but as Trey goes for familiar uplift, Fish reasserts the MrC rhythm (flams!) as if to keep things a little raw. It's the kind of productive tension, an insistent pressure, that's long been a feature of some of their best extended jam sequences.

Then 13ish minutes into the jam, Trey hits a blue note where I suspect he was originally going for a major third, and the whole band takes a deep breath and dives for a nightlight place...from which they won't fully reemerge until the encore. I'm serious: there are smileyface passages in Gin (by necessity) and Ghost (the recent norm), and of course the Strauss/Deodato jam-goof has its anthemic funk 'chorus,' but the primary colour of the set (brought home by Fish's regular invocation of the Mr Completely drum signal) is a sort of relentless advance, like waves coming slowly up the shore to swallow a beach party or frazzled midnight drivers plowing ahead at 85mph toward a bad night's sleep. OK it's not as scary as all that, though honestly the Split has a Tower Jam/Coventry Split vibe that definitely gets under my skin. But when Fish cuts into the post-Ghost glide with those Copeland hits and Mike goes back to droning as Trey and Page darken the lights -- and then again, when Gin gives way to a wailing Thriller-night jam that's the night's centerpiece, biggest stone in the cemetery -- it really does feel to me like the band's remembering, or evoking, one of those stalking spacefunk-era sets, where a groove or mood seems to creep through the whole performance...

To be clear, this Nashville show doesn't sound like 1999 Phish or something. The BOAF runs a tight 6ish minutes, for one thing, and doesn't come unglued -- and the template-setting MrC jam itself is too genial, which is to say the members of Phish are (individually/collectively) just too nice and sensible and settled and maybe just 'adult,' for the debauched vibes of old to fully return.

But then how are they ending a summer funtime show with this goddamn HAZMAT suit Split jam? That's new, isn't it: a set as aggressive as this one, pressing its point one last time like a barroom conspiracist instead of escaping/unwinding into a Slave or Hood or Bug or something. There's no catharsis to this set, no complacency either mind you, just a harried, insistent movement. And that's something it shares, again, with 'Betty Ford'-era Phish -- though again, I think they're coming to it from another direction entirely now. This is purposeful, conscious music. And they fucking get there.

I don't wish to overplay this side of the music! As I said above, Set I is pure bring-your-normie-friends sunlight and the second frame is still made by those well-mannered gentlemen from up north. No bats are getting their heads chewed off, the custom-made guitars were all neatly tucked away after the gig rather than smashed/burned. They don't play super fast or evil anymore and you won't go blind listening to the new shit.

But they got to a place, man. Between this show and the Sunday mishmashup set at Deer Creek, I'm getting that old new familiar feeling. They're well past 50, they're not what they were, 'darkness' and 'intensity' mean different things now, and -- god damn. Feels like they're into something real right now.