Archive for October 19, 2007

Last night was the show, and although I'm very…very tired right now, I'm going to write up my review anyway. I also must warn you that even though I do have pictures, my cell phone camera does not do well in dark areas or when there's a lot of motion. So a lot of the pictures of the actual show are very blurry. Passable, but blurry.

The plan was for me to head out to my friends apartment where we would make sandwiches to eat on the way and then head out. When I got there, I was standing near the bedroom door when Jason walked out…wearing pretty much the exact same thing I was. "Yeah…you're going to have to change…"

After we cleared that up, we left their apartment around 5pm and headed out to Albany. We arrived on the scene after one slightly snafu driving in that we got off I-90 at the wrong exit. There was a little confusion when I-90 split off into I-90 and I-87. We were supposed to stay on I-87 for a little while,but our directions had us going I-90 and never mentioned 87. Oops. Thankfully that didn't end up being a huge problem because a helpful thruway toll taker pointed out that we could get there just as easily if we kept on going, we'd just be coming in at a different angle. So we ended up getting there all right.

We arrived extremely early though, which was better than being late. We walked around the Empire State Plaza and checked out all of the pools and saw the capitol building and all that (which is, not surprisingly, still under construction.) The Egg itself is pretty cool. All of the theaters are located up in "The Egg" part and are accessible by elevators. Our elevator operator for the ride up at 7 was pretty entertaining in that he had some problems with the buttons he had to push to get us going.

Once we got upstairs, we had even more waiting in the lobby of the theater. After a quick stop at the merch stand (where I managed to avoid buying anything for a change) we went and had a seat in the comfy chairs in the lounge area and admired some…interesting art.

7:30 rolled around and we were let into the theater, getting the first view of where we were going to sit. All the way down. Right next to the stage. Yeah, I need to talk to my dad about those tickets (he bought them since I couldn't get to the ticket buying site at work for some reason) because they were horrible! I mean, you could just reach over and touch the equipment on stage. Who would want to sit there? My only (actual) complaint is that our tickets were near where the giant boxes of subwoofers were set up. That can't possibly have been good for our ears. Mine seem all right at the moment though.

The opening band 3 came on at just after 8pm and they rocked, very hard. Their sound mix was also very, very good which is surprising for an opening band. They played for about 45 minutes and just as I had heard, they rocked live. They had a percussion/drummer/keyboardist guy in addition to their actual drummer and he was rocking out those maracas like nobody I've ever seen before. I'm definitely going to have to buy more of their albums after seeing that show.

Then the wait began. 3 had to break down their equipment and set up Porcupine Tree's stuff which took around 15-30 minutes. I wasn't really counting. I was still coming off of the awesomeness that was 3.

Then finally, Porcupine Tree hit the stage. Overall, I had a blast watching them play. But…I need to get a few issues out of the way first. First up, the crowd sucked. Nobody was standing through the set and the people who actually were standing (My friends and I and several people in our immediate vicinity) were told to sit down by the ushers. Oh well…not much you can do about that. Secondly, Porcupine Tree's mix was VERY bass heavy. I would have thought it was because we were sitting next to the subwoofers, but 3's mix was fine. A lot of times, it was hard to make out the music due to the overabundance of bass drowning out everything else.

But other than that, the show rocked. The setlist was good, the band was on…Steven Wilson was himself. At one point a guy in the crowd yelled out "ALBANY LOVES YOU!!!". Steven Wilson replied "Oh, so you speak for everyone then?" Of course, everybody cheered. SW came back with "Well, England loves you too!". The best part of the show, hands down was the encore though. Because everybody was actually standing for once and we were able to get right up next to the stage. Again, I apologize for the blurry picture over there. The encore contained Blackest Eyes, Trains and Halo, which happened to be three of the songs I wanted to see.

The encore was also cool because Steven Wilson's keyboard was removed from the stage so he could come over and visit our side, standing only inches away, rocking out right there. This may sound silly, but I'm just in awe of Steven's musical ability and his creativity. I've yet to hear anything he's done that wasn't incredibly well done. So it was very cool to be able to see him that up close and personal and actually have eye contact and stuff while he was doing his thing up there.

All in all, it was a pretty good show. It didn't top the recent Dream Theater show for pure awesomeness, but it was up there. I'm really glad I finally got to see another one of my favorite bands live.

The show ended around 11:30 and we got back to their place around 1am. After that it was another 25 minute drive back to my place for me. Well, it would have been 25 minutes had I not decided to make a stop at McDonalds to see if they sold hot chocolate. Their convienent 24 hour drive though window was the slowest operation I've ever experienced. They didn't even have what I wanted, so I had to settle for orange juice. Despite the setback, I obviously managed to get home OK.

Update: As Wassy mentioned in the comments, right after Porcupine Tree came back out for the encore, Steven Wilson was mentioning that he was happy that we were all standing up because it feels odd when he's on stage head banging and everyone is sitting in their seats with their arms crossed. She yelled out that we were told to sit down and Steven said "I know, I'm sorry…that was my fault. It's all my fault." So yeah. That was pretty cool.

Update #2: Also during the encore, whenever Steven Wilson wandered over to our side of the stage Wassy would go nuts. As we were walking out after the show was over, Jason (not me…the other Jason, her husband) said "How come you never do that for me??"

Also, since we didn't want to wait for an elevator we decided to take the stairs back down to ground level after the show. The staircase was never ending! It was a rotating series of 6-7 steps then a 180 degree turn and 6-7 more steps. Over, and over, and over, and over…There were far too many steps for the amount of actual distance we had to cover, so I'm not quite sure what that extra distance we were traveling was… hmm…

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