Author: Peter Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Vienna (Wien) / Szene / Austria
Concert date: May 14, 2013
Attendance: 300
Every show by the American prog rock revivalists Spock’s Beard is an experience in its own right, one that fills you to the brim with good vibes while your ears and eyes feast on enviable virtuosity, outstanding musicality and offbeat humor courtesy of every member of this wonderful band. This year they released an excellent studio album, »Brief Nocturness And Dreamless Sleep« (2013), their first with new singer/guitarist Ted Leonard (also of Enchant). They hit the road for their first European tour with Leonard and drummer Jimmy Keegan, who this time round is a full-fledged band member, in the company of two fine prog rock support acts: Sweden’s Beardfish and Britain’s Sound of Contact.
In Vienna, where we caught the Beard boys in a nicely packed Szene, the first of the three openers was local act ConXius. The Rockline crew last saw them five years ago, when they supported neo-prog icons IQ. Since then, sadly, the Austrians haven’t improved one bit in terms of their sound and vision, onstage chemistry or knack for arranging songs that actually have a head and a tail, so they’ll have to put in a lot more practice before they can justify opening for cult prog rock bands. The guys are big fans of prog rock and prog metal, and besides playing they also have a hand in organizing plenty of prog-oriented gigs around Vienna, but as musicians they still have a lot of dues to pay before the prog connoisseurs will have a single good word to say about them.
Next up were the Swedish prog revivalist greats Beardfish, who had to squeeze their set, in the middle of which they introduced their current studio album »The Void« (2012), into 40 minutes. One of the most interesting modern prog rock bands, drawing their inspiration mainly from the legacy of legends like Genesis and Yes, kicked off with a bang with »And The Stone Said«, taken from the excellent album »Mammoth« (2011). All four members, led by singer/guitarist/keyboardist Rikard Sjöblom, charmed us with an incredibly cohesive, tight and energetic performance, which they closed with an unusually brutal pick, »Voluntary Slavery«, a prog metal crusher that stylistically sounds closest to something like Opeth. Beardfish aren’t easy to catch live, since they usually stay in northern Europe on tour, so we were immensely grateful for what we got, even if their set was over almost as fast as someone snuffing out a candle.
They were soon replaced onstage by the British oddballs going by the name Sound of Contact. Their ranks include singer/drummer Simon Collins, son of the legendary Phil Collins, who doesn’t just look like his famous dad but also shares a similar tone of voice. Keeping him company onstage was, among others, the renowned keyboardist Dave Kerzner, who has worked with the likes of members of Genesis, Alan Parsons, Keith Emerson, Neil Peart, Francis Dunnery and Tom Waits. Joining Collins as live guitarist was David Wesley, well known to all Porcupine Tree fans, who has also worked with Fish (ex-Marillion) and Mike Tramp (White Lion). Simon has clearly decided to follow in his father’s footsteps, since he’s both singer and drummer.
On the opening instrumental »Mobius Slip Part 1 (In The Difference Engine)« he first showed off as an excellent drummer before heading over to the mic. For most of the remaining songs in the 40 minutes Sound of Contact were on, Ronen Gordon took Collins’ place behind the kit. You could clearly hear plenty of varied musical influences in their music, especially from the bands the musicians mentioned above have worked with in the past. Young Collins, Phil’s first and only child with his first wife Andrea Bertorelli, and his bandmates managed to convince us in a short but thrilling set that after a rather shy, mostly pop-rock-oriented solo career he has made a convincing leap into the world of progressive rock, and that this is a band with an interesting future ahead of it. Simon’s retired father, who once disowned prog rock with a pretty unfortunate statement, can be truly proud of him today. Sound of Contact will officially release their debut »Dimensionaut« at the end of this month.
Once the Brits had left the stage, everything was set for the arrival of the evening’s main ‘stars’, but it soon turned out we’d have to wait quite a while before all the members of these great virtuosos and clowns from San Francisco showed up. The evening’s big troublemaker, for better and for worse, was cult Japanese keyboardist Ryo Okumoto, who had peeked a little too deep into the glass before the show. Between songs he kept grabbing the mic and insisting on having the final word in some seriously drawn-out banter with the crowd, which got annoying at moments. Add to that his usual sonic nitpicking, meaning the endless checking of his sprawling keyboard setup (Hammond organ, Mellotron, Minimoog…), plus the early problems with the PA (Leonard’s synth didn’t work at all until the third song, so he had to play the required lines on electric guitar), and that was the only negative remark about Spock’s Beard’s Vienna show, which otherwise earned nothing but superlatives.
By »Hiding Out« the great optimists from San Francisco had managed to loosen up, lock in and patch over the technical trouble from the start. Leonard in particular wowed us as frontman, having changed a great deal since we last saw him live ten years ago as a member of Enchant. He has gone from a rather introverted, static young guy to a strapping singer and guitarist with the charisma and authority you need to follow in the footsteps of names like his two predecessors, Neal Morse and Nick D’Virgilio. He brought a totally fresh energy with him, which you could already feel on the new studio album, and now we could see it live too, where he impressed not just with his vocal and guitar talent but also with his humor and his effective reining in of the seriously sozzled Ryo. Behind his keyboard rig, between solo orgies, Ryo went completely ‘loopy’ again and at one point nearly knocked over his Hammond, which could easily have happened even without that one glass too many.
Drummer Jimmy Keegan, yet another famous clown, is quite a story of his own. With his tiny frame, like an escapee from the Dachau camp, nobody would guess by looking at him that he’s actually a real drumming beast and the best possible replacement for the charismatic D’Virgilio. Stability, and keeping things on track, was mostly down to the two original members: the almost always serious bassist Dave Meros, who didn’t bring his Rickenbacker this time but still delighted all fans of supple, dynamic bass lines, and guitar master Alan Morse, younger brother of the famous Neal. This much-overlooked guitar virtuoso, who again didn’t part with his well-worn Fender Stratocaster this evening, is since Neal’s departure the closest thing to a boss in this extremely democratically run band.
One of the few sensible things the Japanese keyboard virtuoso tossed out during his rambling addresses to the crowd was that modern progressive rock needs to be supported in the biggest numbers possible. He also won plenty of sympathy from the audience by calling this incarnation of the band the best in their history so far, however cliché that may sound. The view of the crowd, visually rather than numerically, wasn’t all that inspiring: it was dominated by baby-faced young guys with glasses and acne, fresh from their computer screens or physics lecture halls, which means they ‘did their part’ to feed the negative stereotype of prog rock as the music of overly intellectual, introverted and therefore misunderstood ‘nerds’. There was barely a trace of estrogen in the hall, so it was no surprise that a copy of the new album went to an enthusiastic Japanese fan in the front row, who evidently doesn’t miss a single show by her favorite band.
Besides songs from the current album, Spock’s Beard played plenty of long-time favorites like »Cakewalk On Easy Street«, »The Distance to the Sun«, »Crack the Big Sky« and »Walking On the Wind«. Interestingly, apart from the new album, the focus was on the period between 1995 and 1999, while the past thirteen years were skipped entirely. With an abundance of excellent songs, most of them running over seven minutes on average, the Beard boys have a hard time picking a setlist, since they’ve never put out a bad album, and this time they favored the early part of their career. Leonard proved himself confidently as the singer of the old classics, even though his voice is totally different from both predecessors, while the band, predictably enough, enjoyed themselves most playing the new songs, which really came off brilliantly live too. They fell into group jams several times, and for the big finale Ryo staged a proper keyboard orgy on his portable synth, stomping around the stage with it in his hands like a little dog that has just been handed its favorite bone, while Alan nearly knocked over the mic a few times during his wild trips to the front. Alan proved himself not only as a (too) often forgotten guitar master but also pitched in with Keegan and Meros on the backing vocal harmonies. Those peaked in the complex masterpiece »Afterthoughts«, the third sequel to the classic »Thoughts« from the album »Beware of Darkness« (1996).
These virtuoso merrymakers never stand still onstage, and with the exception of the eternally serious Meros, they love pulling the odd stage prank here and there. In the encore they predictably remembered their studio debut »Light« (1995) and reminded us that the band is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. For that they played the uplifting »Go the Way You Go«, which caught fire as the closing song of the night and earned them a roar of ovations from a thoroughly thrilled crowd before they left the stage. The eternal optimists from Los Angeles blew us away all over again, just like ten years ago, with their remarkable onstage spontaneity and tight interplay, plus a sparkling sense of humor that’s usually pretty thin on the ground in progressive rock, which makes it all the more welcome. Even though both Beardfish and Sound of Contact lived up to the high expectations, the Beard boys proved in the end who the ‘headliners’ were, more than justifying their status as the night’s main attraction and, above all, reaffirming their standing as the leading American prog rock revivalists of the 21st century.
Setlist
BEARDFISH:
1. And the Stone Said: If I Could Speak
2. Ludvig & Sverker
3. This Matter of Mine
4. Voluntary Slavery
SOUND OF CONTACT:
1. Mobius Slip Part 1 (In The Difference Engine)
2. Pale Blue Dot
3. Not Coming Down
4. Remote View
5. Closer To You
6. Omega Point
7. Cosmic Distance Ladder
SPOCK’S BEARD:
1. Something Very Strange
2. Crack the Big Sky
3. Hiding Out
4. Walking on the Wind
5. Submerged
6. Cakewalk on Easy Street
7. Afterthoughts
8. The Distance to the Sun
9. Waiting for Me
—encore—
10. Go the Way You Go
Photo gallery
