Location: Vienna / Ottakringer Brauerei / Austria
Date: 04.04.2014
You couldn’t dream up a weirder, more awkward location for a show by Steven Wilson, the prog rock innovator, multi-instrumentalist, singer and head of the cult band Porcupine Tree, than the Ottakringer Brauerei, Vienna’s big brewery. Wilson, a sworn ascetic, probably didn’t expect to be playing in the middle of an old part of the brewery that’s been converted for all sorts of concert events. The only date of Steven’s band on the current tour that was standing-only had been squeezed into a hall that was way too small. In the middle of the sold-out room, packed in like sardines, you could barely breathe, and every last drop of pumped-in oxygen became precious as the show went on. A good view of the band was made hard by the awkwardly placed pillars, which kept the screen from spreading across the whole stage and so cut down the impact of the studio projections, and by the two-meter giants, of whom there were enough on this night to field a basketball team.
But if you set aside all those negatives and focus on the positives instead, and there were far more of them, there’s absolutely no reason to sulk. Steven’s tight-as-hell band delivered a fantastic show on every level and fully lived up to, if not outright exceeded, the high expectations of his loyal followers, who showed massive support again and again throughout the night. Steven’s crew of musical grandmasters played almost the entire new album “Hand. Cannot. Erase.” (2015) this evening, and through the visuals it also told the harrowing story of the lonely, forgotten girl at the heart of Wilson’s concept.
Barefoot maestro Steven and his sidekicks hit the stage after an extremely long ambient intro that grew into the instrumental “First Regret” and then into “3 Years Older”, one of the best songs on “Hand. Cannot. Erase.” Steven spent most of the set at the mic and behind an electric guitar, with the virtuoso maniac Guthrie Govan (The Aristocrats, ex-Asia) keeping him company as lead guitarist. Even in the technically demanding sections, Govan didn’t stretch out half as much in his improvising and variations as he usually does in his wild solo projects. When the American tour kicks off, Dave Kilminster (Roger Waters) will fill in for Govan, who has commitments to The Aristocrats. On bass guitar and chapman stick he was backed by the cult bassist/singer Nick Beggs (Kajagoogoo, Steve Hackett), who also helped Wilson out very effectively with backing vocal harmonies.
Wilson only takes the best available drummers into his bands, and Marco Minnemann (The Aristocrats, Joe Satriani), who will be replaced for the American dates later in the tour by Craig Blundell (Pendragon), is definitely among the most exciting drum grandmasters around right now. Minnemann, the would-be successor to Mike Portnoy in Dream Theater (he came in second among the top candidates for the new drummer at the audition), took your breath away with his energy and technical superiority at almost every turn. Keyboard virtuoso Adam Holzman (over his career he’s worked with a whole heap of esteemed names, headed by Miles Davis) proved again and again with his jazzy approach to the keys that switching between mellotron, Hammond organ sounds and electronic textures is no problem at all for him. Given how eclectic Wilson’s body of work is, he had plenty to do tonight.
With the title track, “Hand Cannot Erase”, we got the first pop-rock moment of the night, while one of the highlights was “Routine”, Steven’s favorite song on “Hand. Cannot. Erase.” Besides a great performance, the inventive and harrowing animation blew us away too. Even though Steven played almost the whole new album tonight (they skipped only “Transcience”), he of course didn’t forget the achievements of his past, which he showed off at the start with an excellently played version of “Index”, a staple from “Grace For Drowning” (2011). The first surprise of the night was the unexpected performance of the moving Porcupine Tree classic “Lazarus” (from the album “Deadwing”, 2005), since almost nobody in front of the stage expected Steven to play anything from his ‘mother’ band, which he has put ‘on ice’ for a while.
The hall went nuts again with the next song, “Harmony Corine”, a gem from “Insurgentes” (2009), which Steven introduced as a creation partly inspired by the eighties new wave he loved listening to as a teenager (and still does). Among the bands he listened to a lot back then, he mentioned Beggs’ Kajagoogoo, which put a big grin on the face of the bass master, a great positive thinker and an excellent singer to boot. Steven’s crew delivered some very nice surprises in both encores as well.
In the first one, they surprised us with “The Watchmaker”, a standout from “The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Short Stories)” (2013), where for a while a downright phantasmagorical atmosphere took hold. Then the performance of the Porcupine Tree treat “Sleep Together” (from the album “Fear Of a Blank Planet”, 2007) sent the whole hall wild again, especially the female part of the crowd, who threw in a few dance moves to the electronic rhythms at the first chance. At a show by a progressive rock act (Wilson, who hates musical ‘labeling’, actually prefers to call most of his output conceptual rock), that’s not something you see every night.
Maestro Wilson and his virtuoso pals closed the show with the epic spine-chiller “The Raven That Refused to Sing”, which was another highlight of an evening of total ambient indulgence. The harrowing graphic projection deepened the dark closing act even further, although here I have to nitpick a little: on both “The Raven That Refused to Sing” songs, you missed the instrumental contribution of woodwind player Theo Travis (Soft Machine Legacy, Gong), who’s not on this tour. Of course, that was nowhere near enough to dent the very positive final impression, which lingered long after this wonderful evening of music was over. There was quite a bit of regret that the band’s set flew by in express fashion amid the consistently wonderful atmosphere, even though we were treated to a good two hours.
During the exceptional Vienna show, Steven Wilson and his seasoned crew of super-virtuosos took us on a wonderful journey through the many-sided sonic meanders of Wilson’s current studio masterpiece. Along the way, they threw in a few unexpected surprises from the (let’s call it) older chapters of his career, even though the oldest song played dated back to the not-so-distant year of 2005. Throughout the whole show we also got to enjoy fantastic sound, one of the trademarks of all of Wilson’s concerts, which could serve as textbook examples of how to create dream sound in a hall. Next time Wilson comes around, though, Vienna will have to move the show to a bigger, classier hall, because judging by the crowds he pulls, Steven has clearly outgrown venues on the level of Ottakringer Brauerei, no matter how much the various ‘beer buddies’ grumble about it.
words: Peter Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. First Regret
2. 3 Years Older
3. Hand Cannot Erase
4. Perfect Life
5. Routine
6. Index
7. Home Invasion
8. Regret #9
9. Lazarus
10. Harmony Korine
11. Ancestral
12. Happy Returns
13. Ascendant Here On…
—encore I—
14. The Watchmaker
15. Sleep Together
—encore II—
16. The Raven That Refused to Sing
