A Perfect Circle in fighting shape as tour opens at Palms

It was an “I told you so” moment that the silhouette in the shadows could have done without, voiced with exasperation more than pride.

“A few years ago, we got yelled at for speaking our mind,” A Perfect Circle frontman Maynard James Keenan said from his perch near the back of the ink-blot-dark stage. “ ‘Pay attention to your world.’ They didn’t listen.”

Keenan was referencing criticism of his band’s last record, 2004’s “Emotive,” a covers album of largely anti-war songs delivered during the George W. Bush administration’s entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His words came by way of introducing a song from that album, a lurching, martial take on John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a plea for togetherness in fractious times.

They’d play two more numbers from “Emotive,” the oft-covered “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” penned by Nick Lowe, and clanging, near-industrial APC original “Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums,” which Keenan vocalized like a drill sergeant addressing some particularly lazy recruits.

A Perfect Circle delivered these tunes just hours after news broke that the U.S. had conducted airstrikes against Syria.

Thirteen years after the band originally recorded them, they suddenly had a renewed timeliness.

Now, this is not a jingoistic bunch, nor are they fond of spoon-feeding their audience anything resembling a specific viewpoint.

Keenan’s lyrics are mostly oblique examinations of certain aspects of the human condition — susceptibility to addiction, the need for connection, the desire for conflict.

He doesn’t pull his words from the headlines, and yet, four years after A Perfect Circle last toured and over a decade since they made a new record, it was as if they never left, both in terms of the sharpness of their performance at The Pearl on Thursday and the contemporary relevancy of portions of their catalog, like the aforementioned suite of songs.

“Comfort is a mystery,” Keenan confessed during a show-opening, tone-setting “The Package,” his voice darting around billowing guitars as he sang of giving in to self-defeating impulses, a recurring theme in A Perfect Circle’s songbook.

Keenan’s skilled at giving powerful voice to enervating emotions, and he has an ideal foil in guitarist Billy Howerdel, the band’s chief songwriter, whose expressive leads and atmospheric sound-crafting provide the moody template for Keenan to ruminate upon.

They can bring the heft, as exemplified by the gnarled rhythms of “Rose,” the beat-heavy torque of “Thinking of You” and the grand crescendo of longing and release that was “By and Now,” all these songs propelled by a well-calibrated, meticulously cultivated bombast.

But even at their most over-driven, there’s a searching, contemplative feel to much of what this bunch does, a strength that comes from vulnerability.

“I am surrendering to gravity and the unknown,” Keenan sang on “Gravity.” “Catch me / Heal me / Lift me back up to the sun / I choose to live.”

And with that, the show culminated with the band debuting “Feathers,” a beatific, piano-buoyed number.

It was a fresh tune for all-too-familiar times.

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.