The Best Jambands Who Are Not Jambands

Mention that you're a fan of "jambands" in certain circles and you're wound up to get beaten to the ground and stuck with a broken bottle, left for dead while "Dark Star" quietly plays in the background for the 35 minutes it takes you to bleed to death.

There is a certain hatred of long, extended noodling, self-indulgent progressive rock, hippies, and the kind of free-form wankery that comes with the genre.

But the core ethos of the jamband is a list of really attractive qualities for a band:

• Excelling at Live Performance 
• Improvisation
• Constantly Changing Set Lists 
• Interplay Between Band Members 
• Reinterpretation of Songs
• Blending One Song (or Songs) Into One Another 
• Off-Beat Covers 

Here's a few great bands that might not chart on the UmphsPhishDeadBiscuitmoe.PanicCheeseIncident list, but harbor some latent jamband tendencies.

5.  Animal Collective

Like any good jamband Animal Collective draw you into the trippy, electronic drone and just when you think receptive monotony has set in, they shift the landscape ever so slightly, the axis tilts, and suddenly the perspective is completely new.

They solidified their jam credentials with "What Would I Want?  Sky", by being the first to license a sample from the godfathers themselves, the Grateful Dead's "Unbroken Chain".

4.  Iron and Wine

The beard.  The ambling, poetic lyricism.  The humble, polite, laissez-faire demeanor.

On his tour backing Kiss Each Other Clean, with the help of a full band, Sam Beam stretched out old songs with new arrangements, which strayed from noise jazz to skank funk.

They should release a live album from this tour.  Seriously.  Easy money.

3.  My Morning Jacket

Guitars.  Hair.  Beards.  Head banging.  Loudness.

Maybe their Kentucky upbringing makes them hospitable in any environment, but these guys are a Venn Diagram of genre overlap.

Jim James' shaggy swagger is the middle finger to jam antagonists.

2.  Tame Impala

Pre-melt acid trip anticipation wrapped in a stoner, slack, fuzz exterior.

Origin type shit.

Tame Impala rock messy, but aren't afraid to stride headlong into liquid slipperiness and remix themselves into a dirty hippie dance party.

1.  White Denim

White Denim is every band you love in one band.

From their own website - "White Denim is a mercurial four piece band from Austin, TX.  They make forward thinking, free-wheeling rock sweetened with a psychedelic swirl".

They out duel the double lead of the Allman's, out technic the technique perfectionism of Emerson Lake and Palmer, and flat out outwit, outplay, and outlast all their contemporaries left struggling to survive in a plume of their psych exhaust.