Sci Fidelity Records
2007
The Bottom Half
About This Album
Let's dispense with the "jam band heroes" tag right at the start. Widely hailed as the improvisational successors of the Grateful Dead and Phish, Umphrey's McGee are nothing of the sort. As the band's detailed liner notes make abundantly clear, their songs are painstakingly composed and meticulously structured, and whatever "improvisation" takes place is far removed from the sometimes aimless noodling of their acid-drenched antecedents. The process is admirably illustrated on Bottom Half, a two-CD compilation of odds and ends that never made the cut on 2006's breakthrough album Safety in Numbers. The B-sides approach generally suggests inferior material. Not this time. Safety in Numbers was originally conceived as a two-CD set -- one electric, the other acoustic. But that approach was abandoned when one of the band's close friends died, and the resulting album took on a much more subdued and somber tone. Bottom Half resurrects the discarded songs, and particularly focuses on the group's more electric and up-tempo side. The first CD features the typical Umphrey's McGee grab bag of genre hopping -- reggae riddims, folk strumming, Southern rock, progressive bluegrass jams (courtesy of special guest Béla Fleck), and jazz fusion excursions that wouldn't have sounded out of place on late-'70s Weather Report or Al di Meola albums.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 1,2,3,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 1,2,5,6,8 and 10)

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