A Prickly Look at the New Porcupine Tree Record
Posted in Reviews on August 3rd, 2009 by JJ Koczan
NOTE: Before this review gets under way, I’d just like to say I’m a huge nerd for Steven Wilson, so please take these comments in the context of coming from a fan. Not even going to feign impartiality on this one.
Like Opeth before them, UK proggers Porcupine Tree are the latest in the league of already well-established bands to join the Roadrunner Records roster, and they do so with The Incident, an album that, although it?s bound to get wider exposure than some of their previous releases (Deadwing cries out from the abyss for a deluxe RR reissue that in all likelihood won?t happen) and thus sell better, seems less centrally focused on songwriting and more given to ambient passages and open spaces in the music.
Frontman, guitarist, singer, songwriter and engineer Steven Wilson flirted on Porcupine Tree?s last opus, 2007?s Fear of a Blank Planet, with the idea of one album-length song, resulting in the 17-minute centerpiece cut ?Anesthetize.? On The Incident, he once again takes up the challenge, seeing it through to completion across the disc?s 14 separate tracks as one continuous, sometimes meandering, piece of music. Those who?ve followed Wilson since 2002?s Lava Records breakthrough album, In Absentia will be interested to learn the coalescence that seemed to take place within his songwriting, the contraction of his methodology that led to such landmark cuts as ?Strip the Soul,? ?Shallow? and ?Arriving Somewhere but Not Here,? has once again begun to spread out, and although songs like ?The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train,? ?Degree Zero of Liberty? and ?Occam?s Razor? — as well as several others — hover around two minutes in length, what they offer is breathing room between more substantive movements, like ?The Incident? or ?The Blind House.? How necessary they are in the first place is a matter for listeners to decide on their own, but one might consider them the equivalent experiments to the electronic dissonance that showed itself on last year?s Wilson solo outing, Insurgentes. At least he?s trying something new.
