Dither
1. Captain America
2. Faker
3. Understand
4. Tgorm
5. So Long
6. New York City
7. Can’t Seem To Find
8. Water
9. Tambourine
10. In A Big Country
11. Rise
12. OpiumFor a so-called "jam band," moe. have a gift for brevity. Of the dozen songs on the group’s fifth studio album, only four go long, and then modestly so: an average of six minutes apiece. Everything else on Dither is airtight groove-adelia, compact essays in twin-guitar sunshine and boyish-vocal cheer.
But in its gleaming rigor, Dither is not the antithesis of noodle rock; it is the way forward. Too many of moe.’s peers confuse the art of jamming with the easy fun of spinning out over a springy rhythm and a locked chord progression. But the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and the early Cream were all, in their fashion, lords of discipline: Olympian players and killer writers who improvised with the telepathy of composers. The men of moe. are a few years and LPs away from that kind of transcendence. But singer-bassist Rob Derhak, singer-guitarists Al Schnier and Chuck Garvey, drummer Vinnie Amico and percussionist Jim Loughlin have figured out how to integrate song and sprawl. The result is muscular guitar pop with room for rambling. You can hear the spaces reserved for live fireworks in the raga- flavored tropicalia of "So Long" and the crunchy spunk of "Understand." The immediate payoff, though, is the clean, terse detail of Schnier and Garvey’s interplay: the meaty skate of the guitars against the melting-snowfall harmonies in "Water"; the narcotic tangle of twang in "Opium." The restraint may be too much for taper’s-section heads. But records and gigs were different worlds for the Dead and the Allmans, too. The trick is to live fully in each; moe. are settling in nicely.
DAVID FRICKE in Rolling Stone on Mar 20, 2001.