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 Howdy folks! As the title says, welcome to my archive of live show reviews as I have posted on the Steve Hoffman Music Forums website! I pr...

Sunday, September 28, 2025

2025-07-22 Forest Hills, NY

 7 22 25 Forest Hills

Set 1

Very nice dual combo of Moma into Rift to open the show. Neither are anything special but both get the job done as expected. Good stuff! Both are hot and tight and excellent.

From here though, the set launches into the stratosphere and never lets up!!!

Sigma Oasis is 12 minutes of magic. The song is extra powerful feeling tonight. The jam sees them totaly eschew bliss rock and instead dive headfirst into a gnarly, dark and grimy jam fit for a Carini. Hypnotic. Absolute x factor magic on this sucker. MUST HEAR.

Possum in slot 4 is very refreshing and its absolutely nuclear as expected. A+.

The next must hear is Wolfman. Firmly type 1, it goes above and beyond the hottest type 1 readings of the year (and they are almost all terrific, lol). This thing positively EXPLODES in the most incredibly magical way. X Factor magic to the gills, this is a gold standard for type 1 reading that everybody and their mother needs to hear at all costs. Hot damn!

Stash and Blaze On continue the heat delivering scorching renditions both. Stash in particular is close to the craziness of that Wolfman. Stash is probably must hear.

And then comes maybe the gnarliest, sickest, most extreme version of Monsters played yet! I swear, it feels like every version of this song seems to top the one before it. This song is just a monster every time it comes out to play, and this one is no exception. MUST HEAR! NUFF SAID!

The set concludes on a great note with another version of I Am the Walrus. Is that four versions this year already?! Trey has a hard time with the lyrics fumbling them throughout but that is the least of anyone's worries. Getting a Walrus at any show would be awesome regardless of how well it would be played. Terrific ending to the set!

All in all, this was a fireball of a set. Definitely highly inspired with several absolute standout renditions. Wolfman, Sigma and Monsters are BIG BOY must hears and special shout outs to Stash.

Hell this may have been the strongest person in a while! Definitely count me a fan, this set was a barn burner. 

 

Set 2

The second set opens on an incredible note with a massive 29 minute monster of a Carini! This one is ALL love and light, but even as someone who counts themselves as a hater of excessive Bliss Rock even I was completely converted by this version. It rocks powerfully albeit slightly blandly all the way to the 12. The band are tight and powerful and have a driving energy so at least it doesn't feel meander. Then at the 12 minute mark slight loopers and delays and synthesizers start to come out. For the next 5 minutes they proceed to build a beautiful and hazy kind of blissful soundscape. Never going fully ambient but absolutely leaving the ground for the sky. Killer. Around 17 minutes some power begins to emerge and the jam heads back into more powerful in driving rock based waters. At around the 20-minute Mark after an absolutely incredible peak section, things finally begin to deviate sonically for a bit. For a couple minutes we get some very nice funky robo rock, but alas it's not to be. From about 24 minutes onwards they revert back into rhythmic Bliss rock type upbeat motif jamming, everyone in sync like one foreheaded beast. And eventually it somehow reaches a conclusion point with a very cool segue into an unexpected 15 minute Tweezer!

That jam was pretty damn epic! POWERFUL as all get out, even I could tolerate the sonic blandness of the jam because the playing was so damn tight throughout. It never felt meandering or lacking for direction and it felt like a giant journey. For a light and love rendition of a tune it was absolutely pummeling in the best way. Wow!!!

Tweezer is terrific as well. It feels more like a coda to the giant Carini if anything. Taken on its own I would call it a slight must hear, but as part of the greater whole of the set and whatnot it's an absolutely killer piece of music. Aside from a very slight section of robo deviation, it's basically 90% extended type 1 hard rocking raging. The final few minutes of peakage are absolutely insane, sing the jam swell into a giant sonic vortex of type 1 insanity. Unfortunately just as it crosses the threshold into weird zone Trey. decides to kill it and leads us into a 14 minute Mind instead.

Man the ending of that jam was some total BS but that's okay because what was there was terrific.

Mind is absolute funk supremacy tonight. Must hear just an absolutely smashing shorter version. The funkiness goes hard and deep, eventually evolving into a bleep bloop kind of blissful robo delay and looper wall of sound. This is killer and lasts a long while before seeing the jam naturally imploe in upon itself like a dying star. Yo, do NOT sleep on this! One of the sickest shorter jams of the year, hands down!!!

The set then concludes with an incredible magical combo of Life into Hood. All the Life haters can suck a fat one - this one is down right magical. No seriously this is what the song is SUPPOSED to sound like!! This is honestly the equivalent of say an a+ modern Slave or something. GRAB THIS IT IS INCREDIBLE!!!

Basically repeat all of the above for the set ending Harry Hood. If this isn't the strongest version of the entire year then I'm a deaf man. This is no average reading this is one of those "stars aligning", flowing manna from heaven, A+++ readings. If this version doesn't knock you out then you have no soul plain and simple. Holy
moly what a hood!

The encore is rather average tonight. Slave is ok and then we get Tweeprise.

All in all, this was another absolutely killer show. It was a slight step down from Chicago, but that's more due to some nitpicky things on my part. Such as not being overly exploratory on a sonic level or jams getting cut kind of short etc

But they aren't horrendously big issues just issues that are there regardless. The second set is basically must hear from start to finish. In any Life haters need to freaking hear this one. Its amazing. And the energy was HIGH!!!

Never mind the Carini! AND THAT HOOD!!! I'd say the show is worthy of a SOLID 4.2ish ranking. Nothing more, nothing less.
 

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