By Jase Walker
The European blast furnace continues and I’m in Tilburg for 013. While the mercury outside peaks at 32c, I can only hope for a venue that has turned its air conditioning up to 110 per cent because I am absolutely roasting. But what better way to deal with this than to reject the sun, stand in a dark room and listen to a prog band sing about how dire this all is? A wonderful accompaniment to my dystopian reality and need to get the hell away from the burning hellscape outside.
Along for the ride is one of my favourite goths, AA Williams, who I’ve had the pleasure of seeing many times over the years and seen her name steadily rise through the ranks of becoming a familiar name in the proggy and left of centre music circles.
I arrived at the venue a little bit later than I would normally do and was greeted by a gigantic line slowly making its way even now and I get in just in time to catch AA Williams starting her set. Greeted by the familiar slow pounding of her signature take on shoegazey post-metal mixed with soft ethereal vocals.
Seeing her on a stage of this size and yet feeling so natural is a real treat that I feel like I’ve been waiting for her to get to this point all along. The crowd is pretty respectful too generally with people keeping chatter to a minimum which has often riled me before as AA Williams tends to mix a lot of subtle and quiet parts in.
Legitimately though she sounds every bit as good as the first time and she maintains a level of being enigmatic as the stage lights generally remain static and very little actually highlighting anyone on stage. Aesthetically and sonically she is an unbelievably good fit for A Perfect Circle too, similar approaches along the lines of slower songs with subtle passages that rely a lot on lingering notes and minimalist melodies.
I do feel a bit bummed that it’s just a 35 min set overall because I would gladly take a lot more but that’s just how this goes for support slots. She’s got some incredible stuff coming up and I’ll be seeing her at ArcTanGent and Pelagic fests so it’s not like I’ve got too much to grumble about. AA Williams is an experience that people in the near future will wish they’d seen in a capacity like this and I’m going to gladly take all I can get. Fantastic artist, until next time.
Prior to their set starting there are a few loud booming announcements reminding the crowd that photos and video is strictly prohibited, the last of which is followed by Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ intro before the room goes dark.
They begin by completely blindsiding me with ‘The Package’, my absolute favourite song of theirs and I can’t believe it! The stage lighting is hypnotic and to some extent blinding when really going for it. Three main platforms, each with eight gigantic lamps in a 4×2 arrangement with a large raised screen across the back showing video footage and also appears to be “jailed” behind a set of vertical lighting bars showing various patterns.
If anyone’s seen a Maynard James Keenan show before you know the drill where the band themselves aren’t particularly lit up as he’s a strong believer of letting the music speak for itself and be the primary artistic element of the show. Marching along with more recent material from ‘Eat The Elephant’, I feel like this is going to be a decently well mixed up show and I’m hoping we get a fairly decent sized chunk of ‘The Thirteenth Step’.
No sooner do I think that do they launch into ‘Weak and Powerless’, another huge song from ‘Thirteenth Step’, so consider me already quite happy. Their cover of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ also gets an appearance that’s clearly caught some people off guard as an audible ‘oooohhh!!’ sweeps through the crowd as they recognise the piano melody.
As we near the end of the main part of the set, I can see that the ask to not use phones has actually been well respected as I’ve not seen anyone in my view pull their phones out for the sneaky photo or video. The weirdest part of this is that the ‘encore’ is literally an intermission, displaying a 10 minute timer and everyone here clearly seems a bit taken back by that.
The encore burns through ‘Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums’, ‘Starless’, ‘The Noose’ and finally ‘Judith’ with the last being Maynard’s permission to record for a souvenir for the evening and a sea of phones shoot up to record the occasion.
A Perfect Circle are one of those bands that doesn’t tour quite enough but when they do of course they’re going to absolutely smash the ticket sales for every single show they’ve got. Tonight at Tilburg was a total sellout and tomorrow at AFAS in Amsterdam, with twice the capacity, also totally sold out so if they’re touring you better fill your boots.