Wild Orchid Children

Published 8:00 am Wednesday, November 17, 2010

When you put on animated shows the way Wild Orchid Children do, it’s pretty difficult to make an album that can compare. But the band’s brand-new album, Wild Orchid Children Are Alexander Supertramp, is as close as it gets. Thomas Hunter is not a guitarist: he is a hypnotist who uses a guitar instead of a pendulous pocketwatch. The album’s second track, “Black Shiny FBI Shoes,” an eighteen-minute, thirty-two second song, provides ample proof of that all by itself (and people think “Stairway to Heaven” is long. Pfft.) Like the Blood Brothers and Akron/Family were caught in a radioactive accident of some kind and melded into one enormous psychedelic superband, I would call Wild Orchid Children’s freaky rock and roll the ultimate, best-ever jam band — if Phish and Michael Franti’s music hadn’t rendered the phrase “jam band” to be such an insult. With See Me River, Magic Mirrors. SARA BRICKNER

Fri., Nov. 19, 9 p.m., 2010