Orpheum Theatre

“Tonight I’m going to bend the neck right off this guitar,” says Belew in the run-up to the tempestuous second chorus during Indiscipline. Well, something has to give. At this point, relationships within the band were rapidly fraying as the tour neared its end. Yet despite these extra-musical factors at work within the body of the group, it’s a testament to the professional capabilities of the players that they turn in such a committed performance. This excellent-sounding audience recording snares a set that unsurprisingly features a run of songs from the latest album, Three of A Perfect Pair. There’s a greater fluidity present in the renditions here as compared to a certain stiffness in their studio counterparts. Numbers that had not benefited from being road-tested before being recorded really spring into life. LTIA PtIII rocks a little harder, Industry’s ominous and sinister narrative stretches out into a brooding tone poem and Dig Me’s edgy soliloquy takes on an altogether more brutal contrast between the light and dark aspects of this exercise in experimental songwriting. Tony Levin’s work throughout the show is on point but that snapback echo during Sleepless is devastatingly effective. It sounds like he’s hammering every single punter into the ground like so many tent pegs. Crimson sounds utterly monstrous yet just a week later, all of this power would be lost as this incarnation came to an end.

A big thanks to Barry Rogoff, for sharing his bootleg with the DGMLive community.