Jam music and improvisational rock are all about being there, experiencing it live in the moment, with all five senses absorbed in the music and atmosphere. When one can only engage the singular sense of hearing on a CD, the re-creation always falls short of the experience itself. The Steve Kimock Band must have had this dilemma in mind with Live At the Gothic Theatre: by allowing fans to experience a recorded concert with their eyes as well as their ears, Kimock &Co. could theoretically expand the audience beyond the walls of the theater.
All of this theory, however, rests on a tricky variable—the performance—and while the set on
Gothic Theatre has its moments, most of it is only worth one sense, and maybe only half of that. Kimock’s compositions are grand panoramas, and his epic melodies soar with the swooping, diving flight of a mystical bird of prey, but every time it seems he may touch down and explore the beautiful, intricate sounds below, he pulls back up into a seemingly endless flight of technically impressive, but aimless guitar solos and droning, repetitive bass lines.
The band doesn’t even reach cruising altitude until the fourth track, “One For Brother Mike,” which kicks off with a nice solo from the other star of the disc, drummer Rodney Holmes, and explores a solid groove built on one of Kimock’s more original riffs before finishing off at a reasonable seven minutes. The surf-rock, super-hero groove of “It’s Up To You” is a worthy prelude to the two back-to-back highlight tracks, but at almost twenty minutes, it falls back too often on Kimock’s by now clichéd open chord/crashing cymbals breakdown formula.
“A New Africa” shows what could have been, but an hour into the show, it’s too little too late. Holmes’s slow-reggae rim-shot syncopation kicks up a cloud of dust as the landing gear scrapes the ground, and Kimock eventually finds some inspiration oozing out of the narrow cracks in the thick Holmes/Alphonso Johnson (bass) groove, finally playing with some of the emotion that is so lacking on the rest of the disc. Each member finds his own space to play around in, and Kimock and Holmes push each other harder on this number than on any of the previous ones. The band kicks it up another notch on “Cole’s Law,” with Kimock going so far as to actually bob his head and take his eyes off the fretboard for a few brief moments, and a few minutes in, one wonders why it took them so long to get here.
It’s no coincidence that these two tracks stand out stylistically as well. Most of the songs on Live At the Gothic Theatre are almost indistinguishable from one another. This is background music, meant to drift through the space of a room while the listener focuses his or her attention on something else—a book, homework, ironing—and though a live Kimock show might hook a few new-comers, this DVD will not.
Fans may enjoy the directionless jams and hollow, open-chord choruses, and they will eat up the behind-the-scenes material in which Kimock philosophizes on the magic of music while recounting the history of some of the more unique guitars in his impressive collection. Those looking for an introduction to the Steve Kimock Band, however, would be better off downloading a couple shows before spending their time and money on a DVD to which they are more likely to fold laundry than really pay attention.
