@theHoarse said:

2/23 Chalkdust vs. 2/22 Wave of Hope
hard to not see this coming, as weird as it is to have these two played at the first and second full shows of the calendar year. but they are both special. my esteem for the ¡WOPE! has only grown with successive listens over the length of this tournament. el CDT has been there from the moment my ears said arriba!, and while it is the picture of JOTY gold, with each week the true unique mettle of the ¡WOPE! has proven undeniable. was looking forward to a final side by side, as it's steadily been feeling like my vote might end up close.

el CDT is the big phish. you've got a setting of the stage (hard to tell at first if it's astral or undersea) and mood, then guttural, algal funk. still hints of deep space, but we are definitely in the ocean depths (you can actually hear sea-donkeys at one point). chonky life forms come into and exit the stage. you wouldn't think you could hear the pipes, dripping faucets, underwater, but there you go. breathing apparatuses too. deep-scene rapidly devolving into a sea-circus. band enters. faces obscured but could be primus, buckethead, 70's grand rock opera. all the masks have Snork tubes. burbles fill the amphitheater like heat exhausted through undersea vents. lasers and dramatics. a call to war (or gwar) like an underwater Fury Road. shrouding. hard to tell if it's war's entropy we are hearing, but through the clouds we can slowly make out the shore, the battleground for what's to come.

after listening to the prior one more time i have to convince myself that ¡WOPE! has a chance. while i'm not quite as high as some are on '24 (i don't have it on the show to show level of '21 for instance) these two belie any of that. this IS on the all-time level of joty matchups imo. 

where ¡WOPE! loses it is over those first 14 minutes. it's really good playing, but there's just not enough there to overcome the opponent, even if you're juggeragnaughtstic. the rest of the song is unbridled inspiration. i think i said last round it's a space invasion meets heavy metal the movie. Ominent Front. there's the very real aspect here that someone mentioned much earlier in the tournament: this jam, played the first full show of the year, sets the stage for the launch of el CDT the following night. they both have that pre-battle angsty energy. this one happens to be in the air/space (you can even hear the ether-donkeys at one point). the floydian flourishes layered over the latter half are just pura viva. a very unique performance. like the cdt, it's even got the weird play-within-a-play circusy aspect, this time in space-reggae form.

8/4 Soul Planet vs. 7/27 Simple
so, the ruoff planet is good over its first nearly 3/4. there are spots i like more than others, but it's well-played, emotive. there's just nothing memorable. compulsion is in the ear of the beholder etc, but there's very little that gets me there. the last quarter, not unlike the ghost, brings plenty more juice. and i think the fuselage is much better than the ghost. still, we are talking joty finals here. for me personally, it would be the biggest walkover i've seen in one of these to have it go up against either mexi jam. a planet next to a super-massive star. i actually think simple vs will be fun and maybe sort some separate demos out.

Interesting take on the WOPE losing it over the first 14 minutes. This WOPE is my pick for JOTY and (not surprisingly) I actually love the section starting around 9:00 in when they start building up the rhythm and tension, with Page and Trey patiently circling around short riffs cascading up and down over a locked in drums/bass foundation, until Trey finds something he likes at 10:20, builds it up until 11:05, and then busts into that great melodic-bliss solo on top of a pulsing beat from Fish and "rhythm keys" support from Page. They stay in this pocket until about 14:50 and then turn on a dime to the middle weird interstellar chugging section...

Anyway, interesting to hear your take. Ultimately I prefer the WOPE to CDT as I love the variety in the 4 main sections of this jam, which starts with the section I described above, and then moves into the 2) long evil-space-sludge-groove until they... 3) at 22:40 land on a great two note riff from page to push them into the understated but hard-won peak of the jam until... 4) the long and amazingly transcendent outro begins at 26 and takes us through an incredible 9 minutes of top shelf but mellow improvisation (more magic starting at about 30 minutes in with Trey's effect-laden strumming) to close this one out. What I wouldn't give to have been on the beach in Mexico that night to catch that jam!

The next night's CDT is such an impressive improvised composition, but to my ears lacks the coherency and variation of the WOPE... To each their own, and there's no bad choices in this final 4!