Performing: Spock’s Beard, Sound Of Contact, Beardfish, conXious
Location: Vienna (Wien) / Szene / Austria
Date: Tuesday, 14.05.2013
Every single show by American progressive rock revivalists Spock’s Beard is a one-of-a-kind experience that fills you to the brim with positive emotions 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 the excellent studio album “Brief Nocturness And Dreamless Sleep” (2013), their first studio outing 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 stepped up for the first time as a full-fledged band member, in the company of two splendid 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 hall, the first of the three openers was local band ConXius. We on the Rockline crew last saw them five years ago, when they opened for neo-prog cult heroes IQ. Since then, in terms of their sonic vocabulary and vision, stage chemistry and knack for putting songs together so they actually make sense, the Austrians sadly haven’t improved one bit, so they’ll have to practice hard before they can really earn the role of ‘warm-up act’ for cult prog rock bands. The guys are big fans of prog rock and prog metal and, besides playing, they also have a major hand in organizing plenty of prog-oriented gigs around Vienna, but as musicians they’ve still got a lot of ‘porridge’ to eat before prog rock gourmets will have even a single positive 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 showcased their latest 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, they kicked off with a bang with “And The Stone Said”, from the excellent album “Mammoth” (2011). All four members of the band, led by singer/guitarist and keyboardist Rikard Sjöblom, charmed us with an exceptionally cohesive, tight and energetic performance, which they closed with an unusually brutal pick, “Voluntary Slavery”, a prog metal wrecking ball that stylistically comes closest to something like Opeth. Beardfish aren’t something you just get to see live every day, since they usually stay in northern Europe on tour, so we were immensely grateful for what we got, even if their set flew by almost as fast as someone snuffing out a candle.
They were soon replaced on stage by British oddballs going by the name Sound of Contact. The band features singer/drummer Simon Collins, son of the legendary Phil Collins, who doesn’t just look like his famous father but also shares a similar tone of voice. Keeping him company on stage was, among others, renowned keyboardist Dave Kerzner, who has worked over his career with musicians such as members of Genesis, Alan Parsons, Keith Emerson, Neil Peart, Francis Dunnery and Tom Waits. Joining Collins as touring guitarist was David Wesley, well known to all Porcupine Tree fans and a past collaborator of Fish (ex-Marillion) and Mike Tramp (White Lion). Simon has clearly decided to follow in his father’s footsteps as a musician, since he handles both singing and drumming.
So on the opening instrumental “Mobius Slip Part 1 (In The Difference Engine)” he first showed off as a superb drummer, then headed over to the mic. For most of the remaining songs in the 40 minutes Sound of Contact had, Ronen Gordon took over the drum seat from Collins. In Sound of Contact’s music you could clearly hear plenty of diverse influences, especially from the bands the musicians listed above have worked with in the past. Young Collins, Phil’s first and only child with his first wife Andrea Bertorelli, along with 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 taken a convincing step 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 rather unfortunate statement, can truly be proud of him today. Sound of Contact will officially release their debut “Dimensionaut” at the end of this month.
After the Brits left the stage, everything was ready 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 goofballs from San Francisco showed up on stage. The big troublemaker of the night, for better and for worse, was cult Japanese keyboardist Ryo Okumoto, who had looked a bit too deep into the glass before the show, so between songs he kept grabbing the mic and insisting on having the last word in some seriously drawn-out banter with the crowd, which got annoying at times. That, along with his usual sound-checking fussiness, i.e. the lengthy testing of his sprawling keyboard rig (Hammond organ, Mellotron, Minimoog…) and some initial PA problems (Leonard’s synth didn’t work at all until the third song, so he had to play the required lines on electric guitar), was the only negative remark about Spock’s Beard’s Vienna show, which otherwise earned nothing but superlatives.
By “Hiding Out”, the big positivists from San Francisco had managed to loosen up, lock in and patch over the early technical hiccups. We were especially impressed by Leonard as frontman, who has changed a ton since we last saw him live ten years ago as a member of Enchant. From a fairly introverted, static young guy he has turned into a tough singer and guitarist with the charisma and authority a successor to names like his two predecessors, Neal Morse and Nick D’Virgilio, has to have. He brought a completely fresh energy with him, which you could already feel on the new studio album, and now we got to see it for ourselves live, where he impressed not only with his singing and guitar talent but also with his humor and his effective reining-in of the thoroughly sauced Ryo. Behind his keyboard setup, Ryo again went completely ‘bonkers’ between solo orgies, and at one point he almost knocked over his Hammond organ again, which would probably have happened even without that one drink too many.
Drummer Jimmy Keegan, another notorious goofball, is a special story of his own. With his slight frame, like an escaped Dachau camp inmate, 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. Keeping things steady and on track were mainly the two original members: the almost always serious bassist Dave Meros, who didn’t bring his Rickenbacker this time but still wowed all fans of supple, dynamic bass lines, and guitar master Alan Morse, younger brother of the famous Neal. This rather overlooked guitar virtuoso, who didn’t part with his well-worn Fender Stratocaster that evening either, is, since Neal’s departure, the closest thing to a boss of this extremely democratically run band.
One of the few sensible remarks 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, and 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, as it was dominated by baby-faced young guys with glasses and acne who had just come straight from their computer screens or physics lecture halls, which means they ‘did their part’ for the negative stereotype of prog rock as music for 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 eager Japanese fan in the front row, who clearly 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 that evening, such as “Cakewalk On Easy Street”, “The Distance to the Sun”, “Crack the Big Sky” and “Walking On the Wind”. Interestingly, the emphasis next to the new album was on the period between 1995 and 1999, while the past thirteen years were left out of the setlist entirely. With a wealth of great songs, most of which average over seven minutes in length, the Spock’s Beard guys have a tough time choosing what to play live, since they’ve never yet put out a bad album, but this time they gave priority to the early period of their career. Leonard proved himself a confident singer of the older classics, even though his voice is completely different from both predecessors, while the band, as you’d expect, had the most fun playing the new songs, which came off really splendidly live too. They often dove into group jams, and for the big finale Ryo staged a full-blown keyboard orgy on his portable synth, at one point stomping around the floor with it like a puppy who has just been handed its favorite bone, while Alan nearly knocked over a mic a couple of times on his wild charges to the front of the stage. Alan proved himself not only a (far too) often forgotten guitar master but also helped Keegan and Meros out with the backing vocal harmonies. These reached their peak in the complex masterpiece “Afterthoughts”, the third part of the classic “Thoughts” from the album “Beware of Darkness” (1996).
These virtuoso merrymakers never sit still on stage, and, with the exception of the eternally serious Meros, they love pulling some stage prank here and there. For the encore they, as expected, remembered their studio debut “Light” (1995) and reminded us at the same time that the band is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. For that they played the uplifting “Go the Way You Go”, which worked brilliantly as the closing song of the evening, and they left the stage to thunderous ovations from a thoroughly thrilled crowd. The eternal positivists, now from Los Angeles, completely won us over, just like ten years ago, with their remarkable onstage spontaneity and tightness with each other, as well as their sparkling humor, which is usually sorely missed in prog rock and is therefore a welcome ingredient. Even though both Beardfish and Sound of Contact lived up to the big expectations, the Spock’s Beard guys proved in the end who the ‘main men’ were, more than justified their status as the evening’s headliners, and above all confirmed once again their standing as the leading American prog rock revivalists of the 21st century.
author: Peter Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
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
