28 March 2024

05-11-2009 Porcupine Tree

Supports: Demians; Venue: Atlantico, Rome (Italy)
By: Lara Cappelli

Tonight people had a great chance to attend an interesting Progressive night in Rome, with one of the four Italian dates of Porcupine Tree tour.

Demians was the supporter of this show. This French band brought some kind of experimental music on stage which was really pleasant. I was actually surprised when I found out this band has released just an album so far, called “Building An Empire”, since their music seems already ripe. As far as stage presence is concerned, they were a bit static, but that is surely because the band is composed by only three members and the only one who can actually move is the bassist, Antoine Pohu. Despite it, they’re performance was technically perfect. Nicolas Chapel’s voice is really touching and the music itself is extremely beautiful. Unfortunately they hadn’t much time on their disposal, about 40 minutes, but still they used it at their best and the audience seemed to appreciate their effort.

Writing about Porcupine Tree is extremely difficult as it’s really hard for me to be objective. They’re a band which showed, year by year and album by album, to have something unique. Their music has the capability to blow the listener away, and so do their concerts. They recently released their new album, The Incident, and today they choose to play the whole title track of it, which lasts one hour. So after an hour playing, they took a ten minutes break and then came back to play their older songs, for a total of two hours and a half show. The whole band seems to feel deeply the music they play and makes its best to performance it as best as possible: they cure every single detail and of course this makes their shows pretty much perfect. It’s not easy to find a band which sounds better on live shows than on cds, but Porcupine Tree is that kind of band. Seeing them live means literally enter in their music which isn’t just Progressive Rock, but a separate genre. The audience was really loud tonight and in certain songs it seemed people were completely hypnotized by the band. I’ll surely try to catch them again on their next tour, it’s really worth it!

Links:
Demians MySpace
Porcupine Tree MySpace
Porcupine Tree Official