Devin Townsend at the Royal Albert Hall (again)

Leprous

There’s an obvious pull for me towards Leprous due to the association with Ihsahn and prog, but rock bands generally do little for me these days. I listened to a little of Aphelion before the gig, but it didn’t grip me.

They’re an odd live band and some of the time the cello player looked a bit out of place when he was without his cello. The sharing of the keyboards among various band members, often in the same song, was also weird. The singer was wearing a waistcoat and doing some very odd dancing and his voice can grate. For a prog band the lack of any guitar or keyboard lead breaks was also weird.

However, I quite enjoyed Leprous!

Devin Townsend

We’d only seen Devin Townsend a few months ago (in the summer at Bloodstock), but my wife loves him so we went again. We should have gone the night before as he played loads of songs we knew, in contrast to the night we went where he played nothing we knew! Most of it, I am reliably informed, was from the Ocean Machine and Infinity albums.

Devin still plays brilliantly and it was great to see him again with the session musicians he’d teamed up with for his Bloodstock performance. He creates a fantastic wall of sound and engages with the crowd like few others. I’m sure we’ll go and see him again, after all we’ve not heard Hyperdrive live yet!

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