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Umphrey's McGee - Live at the Murat
| Rollingstones |
| Angular Momentum" is the name of a brief improvisation here: three minutes of guitarist Jake Cinninger and drummer Kris Myers ripping in supercharged tandem, like the White Stripes high on the first Van Halen album. That title is also an apt description of the exuberant interplay connecting the tangled rhythms and pop-wise songwriting all over this Chicago-based sextet's first official live album, taped over two nights in Indianapolis last April. Umphrey's McGee are a jam band in that they jam at length. But they surge with purpose, shuffling spontaneous and written passages in "In the Kitchen" and steadily ascending to a thundering-Pink Floyd resolution in "Higgins." And just as classic Grateful Dead concert records like Live Dead were carefully culled from great runs, Live at the Murat is a diligently constructed experience, combining songs and medleys from four sets into a two-CD suite of peaks that proves Umphrey's McGee always have destination on their minds, even when they fly free....full text |
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| Blogcritics |
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Indiana-now-Chicago, Illinois jam band Umphrey’s McGee certainly knows its biggest strength: live performances. From its earliest days at South Bend at the campus of Notre Dame in the late '90s to breakthrough appearances at the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee in the early 2000s, this sextet have made a name for themselves as a must-see live band. On Live At The Murat (SCI Fidelity), the band’s first “officially” licensed live album, Umphrey’s McGee brings it all home. Recorded over two nights at the Murat Egyptian Room in Indianapolis, Indiana from April 6-7, 2007 and produced by “honorary seventh member” Kevin Browning, it features 18 tracks from those shows and spreads them out over two separate discs that total over two hours in length....full text |
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| Starpulse |
| A press release announcing the appearance of Umphrey's McGee's two-CD set Live at the Murat calls it the band's "first official live album," which may come as some surprise to fans who thought the previous discs Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 (1998), Songs for Older Women (1999), and One Fat Sucka (2000) (not to mention the EP Local Band Does OKlahoma [2004 [2003] and =Wrapped Around Chicago: New Years at the Riv [2005 (recorded over two nights in April 2007 at the Egyptian Room of the Murat Center in Indianapolis, IN) is that album, the band clearly states. Despite devoting much of its recording career to live performances, the band and its publicity firm's decision to position the set as something of a new beginning is understandable. As of the fall of 2007, Umphrey's McGee were coming up on a decade of professional work, which is long enough to expect that the band should no longer be defined as a developing act. At ten years in, in 1975, the Grateful Dead, the godfather of jam bands, had long since become a nationally recognized group with a string of chart albums. Even Phish, a closer career model for Umphrey's McGee (and a group whose mantle they hope to assume), broke out at the close of their first decade with a major-label recording contract and an album in the upper half of the Billboard 200. Both of these predecessors really caught fire as the result of double live albums, Live/Dead in the case of the Dead, A Live One for Phish. Umphrey's McGee, which managed one week at number 186 with its last studio album, 2006's Safety in Numbers, released, like Live at the Murat, on fellow jam band the String Cheese Incident's independent SCI Fidelity label, may be hoping for the same thing, a live album that defines the band and takes it to the next level. But while Live at the Murat does seem like a good summation of the group's strengths, that may not happen....full text |
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