#tom malach

Photo by Dominque Miniaci

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When we last previewed a Garcia Peoples show, I thought it was gonna be their year, coming off two great records and set to release another one. We all know what happened next, but the jam band hasn’t stopped releasing new material from their seemingly endless live archives. And last October, they dropped perhaps their best studio album yet, Nightcap at Wits’ End, recorded in Philadelphia with engineer extraordinaire Jeff Zeigler, which combines all of the band’s best elements and adds some more. Yes, there’s the familiarly gentle, lilting rock of the arpeggiated “Wasted Time”, verbose “Altered Place”, and carefully woven “Fire of the Now”. But the record’s best songs are on the heavier side, like opener “Gliding Through”, whose darkly toned guitars and keyboards add some oomph to the band’s idyllic choogle. “How you gonna see the light / When everything has gone awry? / Trust the dream that’s in your mind / I promise you we’ll be alright,” they sing, recognizing both the bad and the perspective necessary to overcome it. That same dichotomy exists even within an instrumental scale on songs like “Painting a Vision That Carries”, a 7-minute jam rife with circular guitar rhythms and vocal harmonies interrupted by blasts of hard-charging rock and soaring vocal performances, before returning to swaying sprinkles of electric picking. And, true to the band’s spirit, the entire second half of the album is a suite, each song segueing into the next, diving into everything from Creedence-meets-krautrock limber pacing to psychedelic, effected wah wah jams and British folk hymnals.

Tomorrow night at 8 PM CST, this great New Jersey band finally gets a chance to celebrate the release of Nightcap at Wits’ End with a show streamed from Sony Hall featuring visuals by Macrodose. (In another perk true to the band, the purchase of a livestream will come with a download of the recording of the show, provided by the band via Bandcamp.) As for the setlist, which was released ahead of time, it consists of mostly highlights from Nightcap with a few from previous releases. I won’t express any sort of disappointment about omissions, since their “Suite” and “Encore” could refer to something other than just a jam, though I am interested to hear how second-half Nightcap highlights like “One at a Time”, “Crown of Thought”, and “A Reckoning” sound out of context of the album’s sequencing.

Nightcap at Wits' End by Garcia Peoples

Setlist:

Suite Gliding Through Heart & Soul Wasted Time One At A Time Crown of Thought A Reckoning Canvas Painting a Vision That Carries Fire of the Now