Particle

The 2008 Trinumeral Music & Arts Festival was one of the most unorganized, frustrating, ambitious, good time festivals of the year. With so many things that went drastically wrong the solid lineup and smooth production helped ease some of the headaches.

The goal of any good music film is to show what it was like to be at the venue when sparks flew from the stage, not necessarily the truth of the moments captured but the essence of the event that transpired. Most celluloid sequences just don’t get the job done—cutaway shots to insignificant visual images, show-offy camera angles that disrupt the flow of the music, short-changed artists with solos edited and brutal slices that choose not to expose the skinned-knee portions of any really good musical set.

Regardless of their object of adoration, tribute albums generally need at least one of two things to work: great songs and a roster of contributing artists with enough artistic tact to find a balance between their own voices and those of the songs they choose. With eleven of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s best, the first criteria is taken care of, and for the most part, Under the Influence – A Jam Band Tribute To Lynyrd Skynyrd does pretty well with the second as well.