Devin Townsend / Tesseract / Leprous - Rock City, Nottingham (UK) - 18 March 2017

The word is getting out about Devin Townsend. When we arrived at the venue, the queue went around the corner and up to the car park. That won't mean anything to anybody who doesn't know Rock City but, well, it was a long queue and the place was heaving.




Due to a hold up parking the car, we ended up missing the first band 'Leprous' (they really shouldn't start so early), so my apologies to them. The other support act was Tesseract, some of whose material I do possess, but who I had never seen live. A large part of their music would attract the label "Progressive" which is fine by me, and also the rest of the crowd, although sometimes the music was such that you had to give some attention to it to get the most out of. Not a problem for a Devin Townsend audience though. I do tend to pay attention, but found that in some instances it was difficult to distinguish what each member was doing as I was able to hear more bass than anything else. I was upstairs, but I hadn't really noticed this before at Rock City.

It had been quite some time since I had seen as many people in Rock City, which meant a bit of ducking and diving to get a view of the stage. However, I noticed one change immediately when Townsend came on, that being that he had augmented his sound with the addition of a keyboard player. Why he had never utilised one before I don't know, but I thought it could only make things better. As it turned out, either because of where we were, or because he was quite low in the mix, I failed to really notice him. The show kicked off with 'Rejoice' which was quickly followed by 'Night', 'Stormbending' and 'Failure.' I could only guess at that time how many songs we would get from the 'Transcendance' album and as the set progressed I was surprised that we only got three, the third one being 'Higher' right at the close. The end saw Townsend come back on stage with just an acoustic guitar and the commented that people should not think it's going to be crap just because he had an acoustic. What did happen was Townsend got into a bit of audience participation where he encouraged the audience to shout "Ih" and "Ah" during the song of the same name.




It is always good to see Devin Townsend live and I am happy to see him drawing big crowds. It was a pity that the sound was a little wooly tonight, but then again, there is always the chance to see him in June as he has been added to the bill at Download playing before headliner Rob Zombie on the second stage. The star ascends...

Andy Brailsford