Concert Review : Porcupine Tree - ABC1, Glasgow

In an age where Prog no longer seems to be a dirty word, Porcupine Tree find themselves as the standard bearers for the genre in the UK. Whilst their last two albums, Fear Of A Blank Planet and The Incident, have received almost universal praise I've yet to be convinced that they are on a par with the albums that preceded them.

Notwithstanding that the band remain a powerful live act and the ABC in Glasgow was treated to the final date on their 2009 tour in support of The Incident. (Ironically, we were the recipients of the opening night of the tour for the prior album).

The first half of the show was a performance of The Incident itself which is a 55-minute piece which takes up the first CD of the new set. Although I'm becoming more familiar with the piece I can't help but feel that this contains too much in the way of filler material to join the songs together. (Let's not kid ourselves on that this is actually a single piece of music - like many such prog epics, it is no more and no less than a bunch of songs with some additional material to link it together to make it appear as one continuous piece). Overall, I think it's a couple of good songs short of totally hitting the mark.

Seeing it performed live only tended to reinforce that opinion, and whilst it's an considerable achievement in some respects I do think they are not quite hitting the peaks of their earlier albums which concentrated on strong songs and was not encumbered by the epic tag to quite the same extent.

The second half was promised by Steven Wilson to be filled with the "ones we know". By and large, that wasn't the case as the band played some seldom played songs from their earlier career along with the less obvious selections from their recent albums. That's not a criticism by any manner of means as I do like to see bands that mix up their setlists. One of the delights of seeing Porcupine Tree in the last six or seven years has been that they have never allowed the setlist to get stale and each one is usually significantly different from the last (more than the mere presence of a new album would justify). It was only at encore time when the duo of The Sound Of Muzak and Trains from In Absentia (much, much better than either of the last two!) brought proceedings to a close.

There is a danger that this review sounds a bit whingy and negative but it's all a question of degree. Porcupine Tree remain an awesome live proposition and seem like they will remain so for some time to come.