Porcupine Tree (support: Pure Reason Revolution) – Melkweg – June 28th, 2007
My first introduction to Porcupine Tree was the album “Stupid Dream”. I read a raving review about the album in a Dream Theater fan club magazine and got interested in the band. After listening to a couple of tracks in the record store I decided to give the album a try and bought it. I would never have thought that now, eight years later, I would be sitting here writing a review for one of their concerts.
I saw Porcupine Tree earlier once, also in Amsterdam in Paradiso, and they played perfectly that evening. The DVD “Arriving Somewhere…” is a nice memory of this tour for me. You can imagine I was really looking forward to this concert.
And what a hell of a concert it was! What a terrific show! The band played absolutely great and the sound was fantastic! It was pretty loud, but it never got annoying (at least where I was standing in the venue).
The band started with the first track of their latest album which are both titled “Fear of a Blank Planet”: a reference to Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet”. (Read more about this on Wikipedia). The music was accompanied by video that was projected on a large screen behind the band. This screen was as wide as the whole stage. The images fitted to the music perfectly and added tremendously to the experience.
After the first song, Steven Wilson announced that they would play the whole new album with a couple of songs from earlier albums thrown in between. This announcement was applauded by the audience of course. 🙂 Every song was performed perfectly, just as I had expected actually. Not that the performance was too clinical or polished: on the contrary! The band rocked big time, full of emotion. I enjoyed every minute of it! Highlights of the show for me were “Anesthetize”, “Gravity Eyelids” and two of the encores: “Even Less” and “Halo”.
Finally I would like to give kudos to the support act: Pure Reason Revolution. This was the second time I saw this young band live and they were great. This time they played a couple of songs from their future album too. I had to get used to the new material, but that was also the case with their first album “The Dark Third”, which grew on me gradually with each listen. Can’t wait for the new album to be released. They certainly wet my appetite!
(Originally posted on my Last.fm journal)