Live Review: Steven Wilson

Near-exactly three years on from his debut visit under the solo-artist moniker, Steven Wilson and band return to deliver his latest musical meditations on existential despair and the contemporary condition.

The first of tonight's two sets sees last year's  HAND.CANNOT.ERASE. performed in its entirety; this draws an obvious parallel to his second time round with Porcupine Tree, which saw them play the major body of their concept album, The Incident, from start to finish as an opening set. But where The Incident was performed without interruption, tonight sees Wilson more in entertainer mode, offering little commentaries and anecdotes between almost every song.

After opener First Regret/3 Years Older, Wilson's words are fuelled by the frustration of the immediate technical difficulties affecting his acoustic. "We're having a quantum problem," he quips, "as in one that disappears when you look at it and reappears when you look away". Things recover quickly and by the time he next offers his thoughts he's confidently voicing his contentment with Perfect Life. The video backdrop drives us through the course of this grand narrative and goes a long way toward seducing the audience into the conceptual fold. Yet the set never quite draws one into the ambience of its world in the all-consuming way The Incident did.

Songwriting aside, this is due also in large part to the brighter lighting and the spoken interludes. While both of these elements help to create more of a personal and intimate experience with Wilson and the band, they do so at the cost of making the show feel less experiential, and take away from the feeling of intimacy within the songs themselves. The technical precision of the band is really something to witness and the set certainly keeps providing amazing moments — Home Invasion/Regret 9 and Ancestral are joyous — but ultimately HAND.CANNOT.ERASE comes across feeling more like a narrative about a person you can identify with and relate to from a sort of cinematic distance, rather than a musical experience you can step into.

Porcupine Tree's Dark Matter opens the second set, and immediately things feel as though they're operating within a different realm, under a different logic. With the exception of two selections, this set doesn't contain any material from the last half-decade. There's a focal shift away from complexity in favour of more simplistic and refined styles of songwriting, which just so happen to make greater use of texture and mood. Index has never sounded so harrowing, and Lazarus, dedicated tonight to David Bowie, has never come across so touching.

The ever-inspiring Harmony Korine is given an extra boost of power with the visuals acting in perfect accompaniment to further dramatise the song's already mesmerizing sense of motion, and an extended version of Don't Hate Me brings a surprise highlight as it's middle section melts into a slow abstraction that invites a melancholic sense of drifting through a dystopian realm, not too unlike that of Blade Runner. Last time around, Brisbane missed out on the extra curtain screen, which adds an extra layer of projector visuals between the audience and the band, but this time we are privy to the full production and, when it drops for Vermillioncore, it brings with it a moment of elation. The intention may be to end on a high note, but the multi-faceted visual and aural delight of Sleep Together damn near pushes this set to a point of transcendence.

The last-ever Prince performance in this city was right on this very same stage, so Wilson's customary encore of Sign O' The Times is all the more meaningful tonight. The connections flow with a room-wide sing-along to Sound Of Muzak, and the finale of Raven That Refused to Sing brings it all home on the most emotive of notes. For many, it's likely a pain to trek out to the boondocks of Eatons Hill on a Sunday night, but with a three-hour monster of show like Steven Wilson's, it'd almost be worth walking.