- Porcupine Tree: as proggy as they wanna be
Triple bills and co-headlining summer tours are usually maddening. Initial ticket purchase excitement usually bleeds into the disappointing awareness of short sets, poor sound, lack of stride, and so on. Fans get the shaft because the gig never lives up to the hype.
Somehow, last night’s Coheed & Cambria/Porcupine Tree show managed to avoid these pratfalls — largely due to faculty and sheer strength of character. The final date of this co-headlining tour ended at Nautica with a bang, even if it was only sparsely attended.
Coheed’s big, meaty riffs and complex time-signature sound careened around the venue like a comic-book film come true. Resident banshee (and James Hetfield disciple) Claudio Sanchez and company made sure fervent fans felt every punch in their catalog and left everyone wanting more.
Slices of Year of the Black Rainbow decorated their set list, which hit peak early on with “Here We Are Juggernaut,” “The Crowing,” and “The Suffering.” “Delirium Trigger” and “No World For Tomorrow” were also exquisitely potent.
Porcupine Tree’s own rabid following would take a three-hour set anytime. While their hour’s worth of dark, angular psychedelic prog couldn’t compare to last year’s House of Blues gig, it was riveting nonetheless. A rare reading of “Russia on Ice,” in particular, was a nice treat.
With focus on albums In Absentia, Fear of a Blank Planet, and The Incident, Steven Wilson and band doled out wicked renditions of “The Blind House,” “Trains,” “Blackest Eyes,” “The Start of Something Beautiful,” and set closer “Sleep Together.”
Propelled by strobe-y magic and Danish artist Lasse Hoile’s films, Wilson nearly upstaged their touring companions. And while PT skipped their epic “Time Flies,” their set surely proved it does. —Peter Chakerian
Did you go to the show? Let us know what you thought of it in the comments.
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This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2010.
14th PT show 7th coheed show. This teamup was off the chain. Seeing PT outdoors was fantastic.
Fantastic view owing to the typical Thursday Night Concert Lack-Of-Crowd, a comfortable temperature along with a nice breeze off the river… which I imagine was a blessing for the guys in Porcupine Tree, who have stated how physically uncomfortable this tour has been for them being British and not at all used to the heat that can be reached in the American South & West, where just about all the dates of the C&C/PT tour were booked. Apparently the bands hooked up for “fan cross-pollination purposes”, as they both joked that “Coheed & Cambria’s fan-base ends at 20-year-olds, while Porcupine Tree’s starts at 30” – it’ll be interesting to see if this makes an impact in that area, but I can say that at the show itself C&C fans seemed to be “mulling about” and getting drinks while a good portion of Porcupine Tree’s fans started to leave not long into Coheed’s set.
Not a problem in my book, however – even though PT’s set was 2/3rds a “Greatest Hits” setlist & 1/3rd promoting their latest release, the utterly stunning 2-disc “The Incident”: one a full CD that’s a quasi-concept “song cycle”… but much more Pink Floyd’s “Animals” than your typical “Prog Concept Album” of Dream Theater-like proportions of changing time signatures and amount of notes played for the sake of… well, changing time signatures & playing notes fast. The 2nd Disc consisting of four songs that were written independent of the first disc’s material by the band as opposed to Steven Wilson as the main songwriter of the group, and contained on a “separate EP-length disc to stress their independence from the song cycle” concept. As a pretty hardcore fan who’s roadtripped to see multiple shows on multiple tours, even a “Greatest Hits” set by Porcupine Tree is far better than the vast majority of most band’s tours to promote their latest release.