Sat. Aug. 7 

We wrestled with the concept of "tribute" bands for years, but have pretty much come around to the idea that if the cover band is good and the original band is dead or doesn't tour, the tribute band can provide a measure of pleasure at a nominal prince. The Machine, America's best live Pink Floyd show, has been doing this gig for, well, decades. They're not as grizzled (or dead: RIP Syd Barrett and Rick Wright) as original Pink Floyd guys, but there probably isn't a Pink Floyd anymore. (David Gilmour just released a double-live disc with lots of Floyd - bonus Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera on guitar with Dave; and Roger Waters goes out to the arenas every so often flying the flag of faint hope against a wall of cynicism.) The Machine doesn't bring a tangled history to their show - just the tunes, man. They've got some cred - they played at the hip Bonnaroo festival and with the Detroite Symphony Orchestra and the San Diego Symphony Orchestra. On Sat. Aug. 7 they bring their unplugged show to Natick Center for the Arts at 8:00 PM.  Rolling Stone has praised their “chilling accuracy," although jams have been known to evolve. Spin praises the band as sounding "exactly like Pink Floyd," while The Village Voice declares that "The Machine is dead-on." More love from Bob Ezrin, the co-producer of Pink Floyd's seminal album The Wall, "these guys are great!"  

The Machine's idea is to take a band with a huge legacy and whomp you over the head with it, the early psychedelia through the art-rock era. Which means there are simple, but skewed, hallucinatory tunes, epic side-long monster songs, a bunch of nasty-minded, system-skewering and (sometimes) self-loathing and sometimes introspective musings. Lots of bluesey-spacey guitar, keyboard layers, quiet charm and barely suppressed rage. (The latter mostly comes from the Waters-dominated period. He's said his dad's death in WW II affected him profoundly and forever and the songs seem to bear this out. There's a deeply wounded romantic buried in the pontificating cynic.) Anyway, The Machine concerts are presented with state-of-the-art lighting and boast and impeccable sound. If you want an advance peek of how close they come to what you want to hear what they do, go to www.themachinelive.com. Tickets are $24, a good deal cheaper than the triple-digit dollars you'll have to pay to see "The Wall" 2010, which is not meant as disincentive. Hell, we'll go to that, too.

 14 Summer St., Natick, 508-647-0097 www.natickarts.org