ATLANTA

4.5 stars. Well I am a huge PORCUPINE TREE fan and have seen them in concert a few times including the North American tour that this show in Atlanta was taken from. Funny but when I got "Fear Of A Blank Planet" I really felt it was a step down from "Deadwing" and "In Absentia" the two that came before it. Even if Fripp and Lifeson guest on here I had a hard time getting into it. Then I saw the concert. Something just clicked seeing and hearing this live. Each song became more meaningful in part from the videos they were showing but the band was so passionate and Gavin Harrison was just a beast. Next time I spun it it was like it went from black and white to colour. Weird but true.

Man this live record along with "Arriving Somewhere..." and "Coma Divine" create a killer trilogy of live music touching on my some of my favourite periods of this band. Disc one is all about "Fear Of A Blank Planet" and man it gets my juices flowing. It doesn't hurt having "Sound Of Muzak" an all time fav on there either. Disc two is surprising for having older cuts like "Dark Matter" and "A Smart Kid" on it. Man the latter track has been such a long time favourite that I felt emotion hearing and seeing this live. "Way Out Of Here" just smokes and then there's the sentimental favourite "Even Less". Bumping this one up to five stars. For the memories!

Recorded on the Fear of a Blank Planet tour, this show from (as the title implies) Atlanta was one of several considered for a live release, before the band eventually settled on the show from Holland to form the basis of the Anesthetize live album and blu-ray.

Eventually, Atlanta would see release on a download basis (initially to raise some money to help Japan bassist Mick Karn's family during his final illness), and whilst its set list has much in common with Anesthetize, the atmosphere here is so absolutely electric that many Porcupine Tree fanatics will want to have both shows to hand, and the slightly shorter track list makes the thing more digestible to boot.

This is absolutely the sort of thing you could put on to instantly hook a curious listener on the late 2000s sound of Porcupine Tree, with an excellent group of songs drawing heavily on In Absentia, Deadwing, and Fear of a Blank Planet, with a pinch from Nil Recurring and some archival dives into Stupid Dream and Signify to round out the running time.

By this point, Porcupine Tree had honed their sound wonderfully, intensive gigging having refined the Blank Planet material to perfection. Whilst prior phases of the band could be pigeonholed as space rock or indie-prog, here the group were in a sonic realm all of their own, following no bandwagon or genre and guided only by their own inspiration. The result is marvellous.