Review Summary: I won't forget you when we part...
I suppose it’s finally time…
I think subconsciously I have been waiting for the right time to review Porcupine Tree’s albums. I thought about doing it when I initially discovered the band, but I found myself having trouble processing their music immediately. Some things just have to sit with you so you can really feel them out, appreciate them for all their intricacies, their stronger aspects, and even their flaws.
When I reviewed Frances The Mute, I went off on a tangent about my now four year long odyssey of discovering music, and to abridge that slightly, I have been ravenously devouring any music I’ve been able to get my hands on for a long while now. I still remember when I began, back when I didn’t really listen to albums and only really cared about singles, back when my favorite band was Radiohead, and back when I thought there just weren’t many good bands anymore. What a naive, young fool I was.
Discovering Porcupine Tree was something of an event. I had been listening to the discography of Pink Floyd and King Crimson, and wanted desperately to find more progressive rock to get my hands on, because it’s far and away my favorite genre of music. So naturally I looked up a list of notable Progressive Rock acts. One of the first was Dream Theater, and I listened to one album, became profoundly bored with it, and moved on to the next band. I remember thinking ‘Porcupine Tree? That’s kind of a dumb name. Maybe they have cool music.’
I was totally unfamiliar with Steven Wilson at the time, though I had unknowingly consumed a bit of his work about a month prior. I listened to the Wilson-produced Opeth albums ‘Blackwater Park’ and ‘Damnation’ and loved those intensely, and had no clue that was the case until I downloaded the Porcupine Tree discography. Around two months later, after digesting all of their music, my friend and I were in a car where we were talking about music, and I had brought up how much I loved ‘Lightbulb Sun’, to which he asked:
“So uh, why exactly are they not your favorite band?”
And then it just clicked. I asked myself the same question and came to the conclusion ‘I guess they are now. Huh.’ A weirdly banal realization, but in the months that followed, even to now, I still listen to them with the same amount of passion and enthusiasm as when I first head them. No other band has really done that for me. As time passed, I underwent some rather unfortunate happenings in my life that made me fall deeper into a years-long battle with depression I’ve been in, and became far more reclusive as well, meaning for a while my life consisted of sitting in my home, in a dark room, listening to music and writing a whole lot, some time reserved for eating once, maybe twice a day. While that phase, technically speaking, has not really ended yet, it has steadily improved, and you bet your ass that I owe some of that to the music of Porcupine Tree, which helped nurse a lot of my emotions and negativity.
I had started off with two albums of theirs: The Sky Moves Sideways and In Absentia. At first I wasn’t hugely into the Pink Floyd worship of Sky Moves Sideways, the album is a grower, but In Absentia I instantly fell in love with. When I encountered their definitive sound and distinct mix of Art Rock, Prog Rock, Psychedelic Rock, and Prog Metal.
This combination is pretty well communicated on In Absentia’s first track, ‘Blackest Eyes’. This song alternates between verses that are distinctly prog rock and a chorus that just shreds with some heavy prog metal, a beautiful and flowing combo that make it one of my most-listened-to tracks on the albums, and just a hell of an opener. You get a sense for good ol’ Steve’s poetic lyricism, boyish vocal melodies, and that when the vocals stop on a Porcupine Tree song, you shut up and listen because it’s some of the best musicianship you’ll ever hear.
That’s a notable compliment I can give to this album, as well as the entirety of their discography post The Sky Moves Sideways, Gavin Harrison, formerly of King Crimson, delivers some of the best drumming I’ve ever heard. Now In Absentia doesn’t quite have the epic near-twenty minutes long songs like say, Fear Of a Blank Planet or Deadwing, where the consistently amazing percussion blows your socks off, but here, it’s a delicate balance between rhythm and just knowing just when to be subdued. ‘Blackest Eyes’ and ‘Trains’ are some of the highlights in that area.
And on that note, ‘Trains’ may be my favorite song on the album, as well as one of my favorites in general. An ode to the fleeting nostalgia of childhood and Wilson’s obsession with Trains (no really, look up how many songs and lyrics this man has referenced trains in, it’s kind of amazing) we have one of the lighter songs on here that undergoes a brief heavy breakdown for the chorus, but the rest of it feels almost like a ballad. This is one of the songs where the crystal-clear production really shines through, the mixing balances out every single aspect of the song beautifully to appreciate it as much as humanly possible. Wilson’s production is never lacking, and this album is a prime example of why. ‘Trains’ also showcases a trademark of PT that’s really well-exemplified by In Absentia, not only is it sonically varied, but instrumentally varied as well. It isn’t quite to the point of ‘Lightbulb Sun’ where it’s so eclectic I’d believe you if you told me the band had hired five new members, but no, Wilson is just a musician with a whole lot of range. You can hear the mellotron that harkens back to influences of King Crimson and Jethro Tull, but here it’s got more of a modern edge, a sleek incorporation that feels so natural you’d wonder why every band doesn’t use one. A great example of all this variation is the track ‘Lips of Ashes’ which kicks off with something that sounds like it came from an instrument that isn’t even on this plane of existence. This track leans more to the psychedelic side of the band, and with Wilson’s vocals and the repetition of the lyrics near the midpoint, simulates the feeling of getting high with astonishing accuracy. It’s on the lighter side, but once the guitar kicks in near the second half, it all culminates to be one of the album’s best moments.
The riffs here also might be the best the band ever-produced, as well as the hooks, rivaled only by Deadwing. The guitar riff on ‘The Sound of Muzak’ is catchy as hell, as well as the lyrics ‘hear the sound of music drifting in the aisles, elevator of prozac stretching on for miles’ makes for one hummable tune, and becomes a song that is personally, deeply relatable because of it’s topics of medication and mental health, which they would expand upon later in Fear of a Blank Planet.
‘Gravity Eyelids’ is the first song on here that sounds really ominous and sinister, but lulls you into it with a ghostly melody once the chorus arrives, perfectly setting you up to get your brain rocked when Wedding Nails starts off, which not only has the best set of riffs, but is just an absolute banger of a song, featuring some noodling and wavy guitars layered under some distortion and creepy ambience. Things go a bit more mid-tempo once it ends with ‘Prodigal’, a song about soul-searching and feeling like an outsider while trying to be normal, and has my favorite lyrics on the album ‘the rain keeps pouring on the glass, the good times never seemed to last, close eyes and let it pass’ and it waves in and out of intimate and relatable lyrical passages and soft guitars that become weirder and more trippy as the song progresses.
This next part of the album is, in my opinion, the only thing that really weighs it down. .3 is a fine song, great instrumentation and the second half really pulls it together, but the first part kind of aimlessly meanders. I think it was intended to be more of a sonic journey, but several other cuts here do that trick just fine, but overall it’s still good. I wish I could say the same for The Creator Has A Mastertape, a song that I have grown colder and colder on as the months have flown by. This song has the same rather generic riff repeated over and over for five minutes while Stephen sinisterly whispers into the mic, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, rinse and repeat. It’s not even that it annoys me, hell it’s listenable, but it’s like white noise, I may as well be listening to nothing, so I usually end up skipping it.
Thankfully the final three-song stretch of the album redeems itself in spades. We have the brutally sad ‘Heartattack In A Layby’, a crushingly sad song about regret, which really pulls together the theme of the album, which is kinda obvious when you look at the title. ‘In Absentia’ is that feeling you get when you realize a lot of your good days are behind you. When you feel absent from your own life because you want desperately to return to a time when maybe cynicism and heartbreak hasn’t tainted you such. It’s basically the ‘ignorance is bliss’ mantra, but while also accepting that kind of denial that feeling comes with. It’s about how bitterly sad it can be when you recall the best moments of your life, which is demonstrated beautifully throughout the album.
‘Strip the Soul’ is Stephen’s last reminder that Porcupine Tree likes to delve into metal too, it’s similar to ‘Blackest Eyes’ but instead sounds way more sinister and intense rather than melancholic. The way the lyrics are delivered make it sound like a poem with some really harsh musical interludes, showcasing some of the best guitar work the band ever delivered, the ending to the song just soars and becomes this wall of sound that you’d find on something closer to ‘Nine Inch Nails’ and ‘Tool’.
The final song, ‘Collapse the Light Into Earth’ is basically the thesis statement of the album I stated before, but trying to break free from the confinements of the sadness of nostalgia. It starts off with a dry little piano melody, one of lyrics being ‘I won’t let the shadows take their toll’ which is sort of a recurring theme on some Porcupine Tree songs, particularly album closers. These albums deal with a lot of negative and sad concepts, be it Lightbulb Sun’s take on heartbreak and loneliness, Fear of a Blank Planet’s examination of mental illness and isolation, or Deadwing’s existential nightmare about anger and loss, they all have a song, usually near the end or just a closer, that contains some hope, like on the aforementioned Fear of a Blank Planet, both ‘Sleep Together’ and ‘Way Out Of Here’ feature Wilson trying to break free of the feelings that hold him back, which is exactly what ‘Collapse the Light Into Earth’ does, a last-ditch effort to not let your own self-induced melancholy consume you. Instrumentally it just slowly grows and grows, and has a beautiful crescendo at the end where the song just seems to sound like whatever the distillation of ‘hope’ is, a great closer to a great experience.
In Absentia is the definitive Porcupine Tree album. It’s their Dark Side Of The Moon or their In The Court Of The Crimson King, and as such, I think it ranks among those lofty heights quite well, just on the merit of it’s technical proficiency and great songwriting, but really, at the end of the day, it’s about how or why the album connects with you. This isn’t my favorite of their discography, but it is most certainly up there, as it served its purpose well of imbuing me with a sense of hope even in my darkest moments. It’s unique sound and fantastic combo of genres and influence create an experience like no other. If you want to listen to the band, this is where you start, and I am incredibly thankful I had this album to suck me in, because I owe it a whole lot.
