place: Vienna / Gasometer / Austria
date: February 14, 2018
No question about it! Whenever Steven Wilson goes on tour, it’s pretty much a given that you have to catch him live at least once! Steven is an outstanding musician, accomplished in every respect, and his musical vision knows no limits. The guy doesn’t need a special introduction anymore. He’s far too important a link on the modern music scene, because he keeps an authentic bond alive between contemporary rock thinking and the elemental, original spirit of seventies prog. Going to a Wilson show is a downright stunning encounter with a singular stew of seventies and eighties genres, with pop music’s discoveries from both decades implanted in the mix and the whole thing transformed into the present. Creatively, Wilson is an artist who serves as a kind of bridge between old and new, and with refined elegance in his own artistry he has also achieved a distinctly eclectic sound. Wilson never stops evolving, and his art is of course deeply tied to the Porcupine Tree legacy, actually its evolutionary next step. That’s logical, of course. And it’s just as logical that Porcupine Tree got “buried” precisely because the name Steven Wilson eventually outgrew the musical output of that hugely respected band, so Wilson decided to go his own way and retire Porcupine Tree. Simple as that. He’s doing even better this way. Especially in commercial terms
Enough of an intro. At a quarter past seven in the evening, with Vienna’s Gasometer only just starting to fill up, David Kollar was already on stage, a Slovak one-man-band oddball whose musical adventurism fascinated Wilson personally, which is why Wilson invited him along on his current tour. David is a classically trained guitarist and also a big figure in jazz. His artistic output serves up a subtle fusion of musical worlds, and the only conclusion you can draw is that with his many layers of polish and his carefree attitude, he’s an innovative young musical mind of a new generation. On stage he was accompanied by an Apple laptop, a violin bow and a guitar. A combination of soundscape sailing and a guitar language that doesn’t stop at the axioms of musical experiment. Moody as can be. Hard to pin down in phrasing, rather fragmented and loosened up, yet challenging and distinctive. Something for musical connoisseurs who can find the expressive bond between Kollar and Wilson, the same one Wilson felt himself, since Kollar appears as a special guest on Wilson’s current studio album “To the Bone” too. The man, who has also toured with Pat Mastelotto (King Crimson) in the past, already has a few albums and plenty of miles under his belt, and at this show he mainly used the chance to present his latest record to the crowd, “Notes From the Underground”, which came out last year.
Wilson’s concert in Trieste in April 2016 felt like it was just yesterday. Back then Steven Wilson and his crew were presenting the album “Hand. Cannot. Erase” and the EP “4 ½”, and last May he already unleashed the new studio album “To The Bone”, which, in terms of expression, speaks to the listener with the greatest degree of musical accessibility of all his albums. In that sense it’s also, to a certain extent, Wilson’s personal homage to eighties pop rock. If I may fast-forward a bit for the sake of explanation, in the second half of the show Wilson told the crowd before the song Permanating that the new album is a move toward the most listenable part of his evolution, the most accessible to the ears to date, probably. Wilson explained that in recent years he’d been listening to a lot of music that his mother loves. That means bands like Abba, Electric Light Orchestra, Bee Gees, The Beatles, Marvin Gaye (and while on Gaye, Wilson even explained what falsetto vocals are and why he deliberately used that vocal approach in Permanating). Wilson also stressed that pop used to be excellent, that lately he’d been listening to lots of Prince, David Bowie, Tears For Fears, and Kaja Goo Goo too, glancing toward Beggs as he said it, and the crowd went wild at the gesture. He went on to say that what his new original song Permanating offers has absolutely nothing to do with what the Justin Biebers of this world and their ilk offer as pop music today. That got the Gasometer back on its feet and earned another avalanche of applause from the crowd. Over the years Wilson has become a razor-sharp speaker, and he used quite a few pauses for longer chats with the audience, with no shortage of a contagious dose of black humor, the kind only a Brit of Wilson’s caliber can produce. Sparkle, witty insight, charisma and infectiousness are things Wilson never runs out of.
The barefoot genius and his crew stunned Vienna once again. The biggest mystery on stage was the new guitarist Alex Hutchings, a relatively unknown name in the musical universe. Craig Blundell isn’t one either, and plenty of people had skeptically muttered beforehand that Hutchings is no Govan or Kilminster, and that Blundell is no Minnemann or Harrison, but still. Both musicians are exceptional, and for what the stage presence of Wilson’s own music and the Porcupine Tree material demands, they’re more than worthy replacements for their famous predecessors, who tried their hand in Wilson’s lineups so far. Hutchings delivered just the right Floydian sound right off the bat, and over the course of the show he won everyone over with the fine softness of his ethereal tone, even a few “Hackett-isms”, as well as wildly fast solo escapades wherever the structure of individual songs called for it (e.g. Vermillioncore, Detonation or Song Of I). In the same breath, Blundell on the other side stunned with some exceptional drum fills that challenged the very compactness of the songs, since with a few more jazzy perversions of rhythm-breaking he could have completely wrecked their structure. And yet, every time, at just the right moment, he masterfully snapped back into the leading rhythmic suspension. That confirmed he’s one of the hottest drum talents on the planet right now, and a carefully guarded musical secret. Bassist Nicholas Beggs and American keyboardist Adam Holzman are already veterans of Wilson’s crew and remain big musical figures. In Arriving Somewhere But Not Here alone, that is within a single song, Beggs swapped three different bass guitars and again amazed with the subtly sensual sound he generated on stage. Playing the Chapman Stick was just one of his expected, standard duties.
Wilson was in an extremely good mood and theatrically inclined! The whole time in the role of chief pilot and commander. During the show he kept pacing from musician to musician, “keenly checking” their work. His trademark of blowing at his combed-forward hair, which on his “page boy” cut always hangs down over his eyes, nose and mouth, didn’t go missing either, nor did the distinctive gesticulating that has followed him since the Porcupine Tree days. The man handled a whole palette of guitars again and of course took care of the lead soloing too. A few times he sat down at the mellotron, which this time was positioned at the back of the stage. His voice serves him superbly and works like a chameleon, evoking through a re-lived vocal performance a reflection of exceptionally genuine emotion and passion. Hutchings and Beggs complemented Wilson’s vocals excellently throughout, with clear, colorful contrasts, deepening the moody drama and the predatory edge of the songs themselves. Singer Ninet Tayeb’s vocals were one of the few things for which Wilson had to use a backing track. Sound like out of a box. Flawless. The performance too.
The repertoire was superbly arranged. The first part lasted an hour. In it Wilson went heavy on the new studio album “To The Bone”, slipped in three songs from its predecessor “Hand. Cannot. Erase” and played the “In Absentia” Porcupine Tree classic The Creator Has a Mastertape (“….which he forgot in the car….”). So, a fifteen-minute break, and then a leap into the second, even longer part, which took us to the atmospheric boiling point. It was especially in this part that the alternation came through nicely, between the more demanding numbers, with their experimental prog daring and fragmentation, and the compactly listenable ones whose choruses lodge in your ear in an instant. In other words, a simple composition was followed by a more complex one and vice versa. This part was also more heavily loaded with Porcupine Tree classics, starting with the opening compositional brilliance, the “Deadwing” masterpiece Arriving Somewhere But Not Here. Wilson also kept the ever-endearing and beloved Porcupine Tree “mini hit” Lazarus in the set list, and next to the gloomy “Fear of a Blank Planet” classic Sleep Togetner, Porcupine Tree fans were especially delighted by the inclusion of another slightly forgotten “In Absentia” track, Heartattack in a Layby. Incredible. Hypnotic. All of it was accompanied by superb projections on the backdrop, as well as on the translucent curtain up front. The curtain, which gave photographers a hard time during the first two songs, was occasionally hung right at the front of the stage. These projections stunned with a combination of virginal fragility and cruelty. Heaven and hell. Duality. The more fragile a song was, even sounding naive, the more devastating the content of the projection that went with it. That applies especially to the new songs such as People Who Eat Darkness and The Same Asylum As Before, though in the final encore The Raven That Refused to Sing simply took first place! Which brings us to the encore. Wilson opened it by bringing a small amp combo onto the stage and plugging in his “beat-up” Telecaster. He announced a song he wrote in 1998, when he was moving from electronics to rock-grounded song configurations. Solo, he pulled off the surprise of the night and took us back to the “forgotten” Porcupine Tree album “Stupid Dream” (1999) with Even Less. Singer-songwriter style. The way it was originally created. Alone on stage. Just guitar and vocals, adding that he was so thrilled when he wrote it that he had to keep playing it. Several times in a row. Every day.
Perhaps the least interesting number of the night, yet in terms of musical evolution and artistic maturing a hugely important part of Wilson’s career, was the cover of Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times. Wilson made sure to point out that this time they’d make an extreme effort and play a considerably improved version of Prince’s hit. The band had already dedicated this song to the late musician on the previous tour, but Wilson still feels that version didn’t do the tribute justice and wants to set the impression right this time. Either way, he once again “loaded up the crate”. Anyway, the Prince cover was played by the band for the very first time on the current “To The Bone” tour at the Vienna show. One of the special highlights came in the closing part of the show with The Raven That Refused To Sing. It chills you to the bone, this haunting composition is that piercing. So much anxiety, melancholy and longing in it, and human cruelty too. Only British musicians know how to conjure this kind of mysticism on stage, and Wilson is currently the foremost patron of them all.
You’re left speechless after a show like this. You don’t run out of superlatives, because the two and a half hours of pure music you get come with first-rate perfectionism and, really, flawless execution. All you can say is: “Where and when is the next Wilson show?” The answer: “Verona, Monday, June 25, 2018, the old Roman amphitheater.” We’re already there in our heads. In short. Going to a Wilson concert remains a brilliance without equal.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
setlist:
Set 1:
1. “Truth” (short film, pre-recorded intro)
2. Nowhere Now
3. Pariah
4. Home Invasion
5. Regret #9
6. The Creator Has a Mastertape
7. Refuge
8. People Who Eat Darkness
9. Ancestral
—break approx. 20 minutes—-
Set 2:
10. Arriving Somewhere but Not Here
11. Permanating
12. Song of I
13. Lazarus
14. Detonation
15. The Same Asylum as Before
16. Heartattack in a Layby
17. Vermillioncore
18. Sleep Together
—encore—
19. Even Less
20. Sign “☮” the Times
21. The Raven That Refused to Sing
