PORCUPINE TREE

House Of Blues TRANSMISSION

Limited edition vinyl release of muscular 2003 live set.

Are Porcupine Tree the hardest working ex-band in show business? They haven’t been active as a group since 2010, yet there’s been a flurry of activity and reissues from them over the last year or two, whether it’s revamping their website, launching a new YouTube channel, releasing live recordings and rarities on a Bandcamp page or reissuing their back catalogue in various sumptuous vinyl and box set incarnations. Clearly absence is only making the public’s hearts grow fonder.

This latest recording is now not only downloadable on the aforementioned Bandcamp, but also available to hold in our grateful hands on limited-edition double blue vinyl. If the recent reissue of 2012’s Octane Twisted live album was a reminder of the final stage of the band’s evolution, then

House Of Blues – recorded at the eponymous Los Angeles venue in July 2003 – captures Steven Wilson and co in what many fans will regard as their imperial phase.

House Of Blues isn’t quite a classic ‘greatest hits’ live LP. It focuses most heavily on what would turn out to be the middle period of Porcupine Tree’s career – the earliest track, Moon Touches Your Shoulder, comes from 1995’s The Sky Moves Sideways album. Although they were touring as co-headliners with Opeth, ostensibly to promote 2002’s In Absentia, only three tracks from that album are performed here (a fourth,

Trains, was a played as second encore, but omitted from this recording as a broken guitar string interrupted the performance). “This is about as heavy as it’s gonna get tonight,” Wilson warns fans of the Swedish prog metal giants, before launching into a reading of Futile, wreathed in barbed wire guitar.

But fans of the harder stuff are certainly not left wanting. The stuttering, machine gun volley of a central riff explodes across Blackest Eyes with visceral impact, heightened by the grunt of the newly introduced Gavin Harrison on drums; the encore of Strip The Soul makes Porcupine Tree’s oftemployed quiet-loud dynamic sound starker and more satisfying than ever; then the motorbike roar of Wedding Nails’s metallic malevolence ends the set on a blazing, intense high. Meanwhile, they’re also on sublime melodic form, whether it’s the Wall-like despondency of Russia On Ice, the skyscraping guitar figure that punctuates Even Less, or Wilson’s mournful vocal delivery of Gravity Eyelids, the latter reminiscent of Talk Talk at their most melancholic.

It all results in a live album that doesn’t just constitute a fine showcase for a great band, but will fill fans with that yearning feeling of “God, I wish I’d been there.”

CAPTURES STEVEN WILSON AND CO IN THEIR IMPERIAL PHASE.