String Cheese Incident -- "Outside Inside"

Taking a more rock style for their third studio album, the bluegrass influenced jam band String Cheese Incident, tries to showcase their talent to a larger audience. For those that don't know much about Jam Bands, it's a movement of bands which focus on improvisation more then form in their songs. Having live concerts where a song which may sound one way on an album sounds much differently when they play it. This style is something I really like as I enjoy being surprised and finding new ways for things to be done. I enjoy improvisation quite a bit and String Cheese Incident (SCI for short) is one of the best. Now the strength of most Jam Bands is in their live performace which means that their albums are usually a lot less desired. Jam Bands usually feed off of the energy of the audience and with no such thing in a studio they are out of their element, and you can definatly tell the difference when you listen to it. However for this album I think String Cheese really wanted to put together a good album, and though it's still not as good as their live stuff it is their best album I've heard thus far. The song "Latinissmo" especially which relies heavily on light salsa music is very good. One thing about SCI that is interesting is there is no front man, each of the members of the band have written about as many songs as the rest of the members. So you find lots of different tastes in each song.

Overall I'd say this is a good starting point into the world of Jambands, and also just a really good cd in which many people could probably like, even if you're not a big fan of Jambands. It's probably one of the most universal albums in the genre. Overall I'm going to give this one a 3.5 out of 4 stas as it is really close to getting high honors but not quite there. Still it comes highly recommended.