Porcupine Tree - The Tabernacle - 27th April, 2010

Listen to the Dark Side of the Moon, go there, lose all sense of the 4 beat rhythm which the rest of the world plays, make best friends with the Wizard of sound (Rudess).... and then rape some 1500 souls, live, in Atlanta in a single night of progressive-melodic-psyechedlic-hardcore indulgence.

Perhaps then, you would know how a porcupine tree is grown.

This was an evening double the worth that we were charged to witness it. They were simply amazing. Every chord struck (sometimes barely struck so as to give you only a notion that maybe it was struck, but had changed itself into a 4th major add 11th while giving the impression that it was the drums that made that half-sound) and every riff and bass line that was played was fantastic. Some were better than that.

The setlist for the show was:

Setlist:

1. Occam’s Razor
2. The Blind House
3. Great Expectations
4. Kneel and Disconnect
5. Drawing the Line
6. The Incident
7. Your Unpleasant Family
8. The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train
9. Time Flies
10. Degree Zero of Liberty
11. Octane Twisted
12. The Séance
13. Circle of Manias
14. I Drive the Hearse

Intermission

1. The Start of Something Beautiful
2. Russia on Ice
3. Anesthetize (Part 2: “The Pills I’m Taking”)
4. Lazarus
5. Way Out of Here
6. Normal
7. Bonnie the Cat

Encore

1. The Sound of Muzak
2. Trains

PTree has captured my imagination and interest beyond reclaim. The riffs were basic and attention focusing, while the bassist (Colin Edwin) bounced about lightly, playing some crazy lines mapping almost every note across all the strings on his bass, and the drummer (Gavin Harrison) played as if he were suckling his thumb and not performing inhuman and exquisitely precise and classy rolls separated by time signatures alternating across a wide range of prime numbers.

The one disappointment was the tone of the piano in Lazarus. It sounded like a lousy electric piano tone rather than the softly hammered one in the original. That really killed the song. However, everything else was outstanding. The guy on the keys, Richard Barbieri, was not a guy on keys... he was a god working a collage of instruments , a mac, and probably a couple of racks.

P.S: The last time I had some much fun counting is........ when we used to get candy for doing it right in kindergarten.

Join me the next time I go,

Mukul (a high and dazed one)