After funding, producing, and releasing their own albums for the better part of two decades,
moe.
went corporate (by jam band standards, at least) by signing with
Sugar Hill Records
.
What Happened to the La Las
kicks off the new partnership with a mix of heady Southern rock and rootsy, festival-friendly funk. Longtime fans may be worried about the loss of
's cottage industry, and some of the band's defining characteristics -- the improvised sprawl of their jams, the multi-minute length of their guitar solos -- do get tempered this time around, thanks in large part to
John Travis
, the band's first outside producer since 1998's
Tin Cans and Car Tires
Travis
polishes up the band's sound and smooths down their rough edges, but moe. still sound like
, particularly on guitar-heavy songs like "Downward Facing Dog" and "Paper Dragon." Several of the remaining eight songs have been kicking around
's set lists for years, meaning even the most conservative-minded
-rons -- i.e. the ones who don't want to share their band with a label, even one as sympathetic as
Sugar Hill
-- will have something familiar to cling to. But
doesn't want to throw its listeners for a loop. It wants to evolve, to amplify the band's eclectic noise, to bring another musical mind into the creation process and see what happens. ~ Andrew Leahey