On a Friday night, Chicago’s Umphrey’s McGee stormed the Eagle’s Ballroom in Milwaukee for the third consecutive fall, and for the third time in a row, the focus of most discerning attendees was not how good the band was, but how bad the venue was.  It’s not that it’s impossible to have a good time there, after all, 2 free drinks with a ticket is a pretty good deal.  If you’ve ever been to the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, picture that room rotated 90 degrees, so you have a very wide and shallow room in which to hear music, and to add to the bad geometry, all the walls are curved to bounce the sound around.

The first set started off with “Words” off their last album Safety in Numbers, which quickly built into a big rocking ending.  My friend had commented to me that Pony (bassist Ryan Stasik) needed to step it up a bit, but I think it all comes back to the venue.  In the back of the room, the bass was a booming echo, and near the soundboard where we were standing, the bass had to be relatively quiet to prevent the people on the back wall from having their ears bleed from too much echo.  Despite the limitations of this venue, every year the band does a superb job in working with what they have, and lots of props go out to their soundman Kevin Browning.  The first set continued with what is one of my favorite instrumentals, “Dump City”, a song that reaches into their prog-rock influences to take the audience on a 10-minute plus ride through some very structured jamming.  At one point during the composed jam, or “Jimmy Stewart” as it is often referred to, guitarist Jake Cinninger looked almost like a third base coach, giving signs to the rest of the band, bringing everyone along for an improv session right on the stage, before dropping it back into “Dump City”.  “Thin Air” closed out the first set, and was a definite highlight of the show.  This song starts off with a Pink Floyd-esque laid back groove, reminiscent of Dark Side of the Moon.  While the song starts out slow, it ends like a wild rollercoaster, with Umphrey’s performing their own 90 second rendition of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” to finish off the set.

In the second set, the rest of the band got a chance to show off their stuff as well.  Beginning with the crowd favorite “Pay the Snucka I & II”, the band embarked on another journey through their musical influences, but first paid tribute to an old friend.  “Rocker II” is sort of a sequel song to a ballad about a close friend of the band who passed away after a show, and while most of the people in the audience don’t know the story, the band clearly does, and they put just a little extra effort into this one, and it really showed in their flawless execution of it.  Next up came the Bob Marley cover “Rastaman Chant”, which was all but lost on this young crowd.  Just as the set was starting to wind towards the end, the anthemic “Slacker” roared out of Brendan Bayliss’s guitar and the entire place loved it.  Bayliss’s lyrics were especially strong for this one, and this song has certainly evolved from a catchy pop tune into bona-fide rock ‘n roll.

The band came out for the obligatory encore, and every time I see them it seems as if the encore break is shorter and shorter, like they can’t wait to get out there and squeeze a few more tunes out of the main set.  They ran through fairly standard versions of their own songs “The Fuzz” and “Glory” before leaving us with the purely metal inspired “Pay the Snucka III” which is about 2 ½ minutes of high-octane speed metal, with a jam band’s touch.

I first saw Umphrey’s McGee in 2002, and this band has definitely grown up, even if it seems that their fan base has not.  They have a new album called Mantis due in January, as well as 3 dates at the beautiful Auditorium Theatre for New Year’s Eve.  This band is always seeing what they can do to make themselves better, and the results are always there in the live performance.  If you have not seen this band yet and consider yourself a fan of live music, this is a band that needs to be on your list, and living in Chicago, we get to see their hometown shows, which are always just a tiny bit better.