String Cheese Incident

With the decision by Phish to stop touring for a while, Colorado's String Cheese Incident is one of the bands most likely to find legions of misplaced Phish-heads following them on tour. Musically, the band is a little more jazzed out live than Phish were on a regular basis, but on their new Steve Berlin-produced studio album, their first in over three years, one can't help but be reminded of latter-day Let It Roll era Little Feat and late '70s Grateful Dead. The band mixes jazz and reggae-inspired feel into their musical mix and manages to pull out some real winners, like album opener "Outside and Inside." At other points in the record, like the complete Latin-inspired turnaround of the aptly named "Latinissmo" and the full acoustic bluegrass stomp of "Up The Canyon," which revisits the band's original musical style, the band proves themselves to be much more than just another jam band. Having said that, it must be noted that there are also some real clunkers on this album, and not even the top-notch production can save them. Also worth mentioning is the new SCI remix album that has recently been compiled by Colorado's DJ Harry. He has created a 65-minute album of house music based solely on samples taken from the SCI's output, both live and studio. Surprisingly, the record works better than you would expect it to. It's not really a big secret that a lot of jam-heads are also into the rave scene, as the main objective of both scenes is to get into the groove of the music, and with this remix record DJ Harry has managed to do just that. Although truth be told, I am sure this will appeal more to the hippie sect than the raver one.