Category: Porcupine Tree

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Porcupine Tree: the Best Tracks from The First Five Albums

Ten classic tracks from the early albums from On The Sunday of Life (1992) to Stupid Dream (1999)

In November 2022, Porcupine Tree made a triumphant return to London to play live at London Arena in front of over 12,000 fans after a hiatus of over twelve years. The event was described by The Times as ‘a prog-rock comeback of propulsive perfection.’

Porcupine Tree began essentially as a solo project for Steven Wilson, a fictitious band he had created to amuse himself. On the band’s first album, On The Sunday Of Life, some of the lyrics were written by his friend Alan Duffy, but otherwise Wilson wrote and performed the whole record. By the second album, Up The Downstair he began to be joined by other musicians and by the third album The Sky Moves Sideways Porcupine Tree had become a full band, largely so that Wilson could have his music played live.

Two decades later, the band began a run of classic albums that began with In Absentia in 2002. But the early albums have a great deal to offer, not just because they show the fascinating development of the band from psychedelia to their mature style, but also because they contain some very strong songs that demonstrate Wilson’s excellent songwriting, producing and arranging skills from the very start of his career.

On The Sunday of Life (1992)

Radioactive Toy

A song about nuclear war. The ‘radioactive toy’ which provides the ‘freedom to destroy’ suggests the words of Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, who quoted from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ when he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on 16 July 1945. The following month, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The track is closely related to ‘A Smart Kid’ from Porcupine Tree’s fifth album Stupid Dream, which describes the effects of nuclear war.

Lyrically ‘Radioactive Toy’ is very sophisticated. It shows Wilson’s early ability to write poetic lyrics that encapsulate a mood or an idea very elegantly and with great economy, as in the bleak line describing disposal of a body after a nuclear war,

Pour me into a hole, inform my next of kin

The same level of sophistication can be found in the musical structure and feel of the song; only the first few minutes feature vocals, after which it becomes a long instrumental. The long form song has been a feature of Wilson’s writing throughout his career, both with Porcupine Tree and his later solo projects.

The bass line of ‘Radioactive Toy’ is very reminiscent of ‘Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 2’ from Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979); it is in the same key as well, although it is slower, bringing a more ominous feel. The guitar parts are in a similar style to those of David Gilmour and lyrically the dark theme is very Floydian, leading some early fans of Porcupine Tree to hope that the band would be the next Pink Floyd.

Whether or not the Pink Floyd comparison is valid, the track is the most satisfying on the album, a real highlight, and it gives a fascinating insight into the future direction the band would take. The fact that it is a personal favourite of Wilson’s is shown by his choice of the song for the setlist for the first ever live gig that Porcupine Tree played, in December 1993. He was still playing it twenty years later, on the 2013 tour supporting his solo album The Raven that Refused to Sing.

And The Swallows Dance Above The Sun

The lyrics for this early track were written by Alan Duffy. According to the sleeve notes for the Stars Die compilation, they form a psychedelic poem about, ‘the contradictions of being trapped in boredom while surrounded by wonder.’ Duffy originally called the song ‘Like Ice On The Sun’ when he sent it to Wilson, but the name was changed later.

Wilson’s vocal delivery perfectly conjures up the mood of the lyrics, sounding breathless with excitement but bored at the same time, the repetition of the same rhythmic and lyrical pattern creating a trance-like effect. The rhythm is provided by a drum machine, with a similar feel to the drum break in James Brown’s 1970 song Funky Drummer. With its funky bassline and heavy echo on the voice, smooth synth pads and inventive guitar parts, the song has something of a long-lost early 1990s dance classic. The track also has a pleasing set of falling chords as it drifts languidly towards the words, ‘and the swallows dance above the sun.’ Although it is very different from most of the songs Wilson has written in the three decades since, there are signs here of a great songwriter finding his voice.

Up The Downstair (1993)

Always Never

This is one of a number of tracks on the album with lyrics by Alan Duffy. The song is about the different stages of a relationship, compressed into two lines,

I love you sometimes

Always never

The relationship is over now, and the narrator feels completely alienated from the addressee of the song and has become emotionally detached.

This track marks the debut of Colin Edwin as bass player. The bass line is less prominent than on many of the songs from later albums, but it is an auspicious start, demonstrating the inventiveness and great musicality that characterised Colin’s work throughout his career with the band. The song also features a riff that unites the guitar and bass, around two minutes in, that could have come from one of the much later albums if more distortion had been added, again an early sign of the much more heavy metal sound the band would later adopt.

The vocals in the verse sound completely resigned, reflecting the emptiness of the narrator’s feelings. The chorus is livelier, illustrating the fast movement of the relationship from beginning to end. It could be the chorus from a simple pop song, and sticks in the mind in the way that pop choruses often do. If the song stopped at three minutes, then it could be a single, but there are another four minutes of largely instrumental music to follow. After treading water for a while before the final verse is delivered, the track picks up momentum with a long guitar solo as it hurtles towards the conclusion, where again there is a brief moment of stasis leading into the title track.

Up The Downstair

According to the sleeve notes for Stars Die, this track is a ‘menacing trance epic.’ The song marks the introduction of keyboard player Richard Barbieri to the band. The track also features spoken words from Richard’s wife Suzanne, a writer and musician.

The spoken words are a stream of consciousness written by Wilson, including phrases like ‘Monuments burn into moments’ (the title of an earlier short track on the album) and

Black Sunday of sleep

Open for small angel escapes

The words are buried quite deep in the mix and are meant to create a surreal impression rather than being analysed in a conventional way.

The track begins with an ominous low drone which is joined by dystopian synth lines and a Mellotron choir which sounds like morose monks chanting. The synthesized bass line is trancelike, euphoric and mesmeric, endlessly looping back on itself. The heavily sequenced synth chords sparkle and glitter. The guitar part that arrives with a sudden change of key around four minutes is urgent, driving, and viscerally exciting.

At around seven minutes, the bass drops out and there is brief passage of introspection before the rhythm picks up again and tension builds as the track ascends to a climax, before dropping back into contemplation as the monks briefly return.

Being able to build up the dynamics over a long track (ten minutes in this case) has stood Wilson in good stead over his very long and productive career.

The Sky Moves Sideways (1995)

Stars Die

Although not on the original UK album release, this track did appear on the US release in 1995. It is a very strong track, suggesting the direction the band was heading in future albums, and it therefore seems strange that it was left off the original UK release. The track gives its name to the 2002 compilation Stars Die: The Delerium Years 1991–1997, which is an excellent introduction to Porcupine Tree’s early years.

The song is beautifully melancholy, with a simple but haunting chorus that consists of only the two words of the title, in a two-note rising phrase with luxurious backing vocals. The concept of stars dying suggests that in the long term everything dies, that humanity is fragile and ephemeral and that the Earth itself will eventually perish.

The sample at around 2:30 is of President Richard Nixon speaking from the Oval Office in the White House to the Apollo 11 astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during the first Moon Landing in 1969. In what he describes as ‘the most historic telephone call ever made’, the President says that the astronauts’ achievements have inspired mankind to ‘redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Earth.’

Perhaps the mission to the Moon brings hope. Although the song itself does not suggest that ‘peace and tranquillity’ will come to Earth, it does end with an image of humanity blasting away into space, astronauts in ‘hyper sleep’, the deep coma-like sleep that is essential for long-distance space travel.

A Dislocated Day

On the original 1995 album all instruments on this track are performed by Wilson. Drums were added later by Gavin Harrison (who joined the band in 2002) for the 2004 re-release.

The track begins with a phone call which is not answered until the end, when Wilson is heard leaving a message. The rhythm is quite uneven and jerky, expertly creating a physical impression of the dislocation in the title. At the same time the sense of metaphorical dislocation from the rest of the world is beautifully expressed by the floating synthesisers and the detached vocals, drifting downwards as the track progresses. The surreal lyrics suggest that Wilson was still under the influence of Alan Duffy, retaining also some of Duffy’s quirky wit,

Stood beside an inlet

A starfish leads a dance

It dreams it is a human

And falls into a trance

The song ends with the recorded telephone message, in which Wilson gives us a glimpse of his thought processes about how the track could end, but rather than replacing that thought with music he leaves the raw material,

…acoustic guitar … feeding back towards the end. I think that would make quite an interesting ending. Anyway, let me know what you think and I’ll speak to you soon. Bye.

Signify (1996)

Dark Matter

This track was originally called ‘Toursong.’ According to the notes for the Stars Die compilation, it began life as, ‘a fairly drab account of life on the road and its attendant boredoms’, but the band’s manager Richard Allen and the other members of Porcupine Tree objected to the lyrics which amounted to, ‘came off stage, had a cup of tea, went to bed’. Wilson changed them so that they were, ‘about the business of being a musician and a product’, to make it a haunting meditation on the futility and emptiness of the life of touring artist.

The title ‘Dark Matter’ refers to the release of recordings which the record companies regard as ‘product’, something ephemeral, rather than of lasting artistic significance, a theme to which Wilson returned on the next album Stupid Dream,

Dark matter flowing out on to a tape

Is only as loud as the silence it breaks

Most things decay in a matter of days

The product is sold the memory fades

The song begins with darkly atmospheric synth washes, evoking the permafrost inside the tour bus,

Inside the vehicle the cold is extreme

The cold is a metaphor for a failure to engage with the outside world,

I fail to connect, it’s a tragic divide

The protagonist ruminates on the fact that music has become a full-time career, but that there are other, quicker ways to become famous when you are young,

To die young would take only 21 years

Gun down a school or blow up a car

The media circus would make you a star

The song features some gorgeous Hammond organ playing from Richard Barbieri, showing his love of vintage keyboards rather than using emulation software to recreate sounds digitally. Wilson’s vocals are very closely-mic’d in the verses, giving the impression that the listener is on the tour bus with him. Most unusually for a Porcupine Tree song, the verses feature backing vocals, presumably from Chris Maitland (although he does not receive a specific credit for this track); usually the lush vocal harmonies that are so characteristic of many of the band’s songs appear only in the choruses, although the chorus of this song also features rich harmonies.

The song includes an extended guitar solo section which lasts around two minutes, culminating in a short section where the bass and the guitar join each other for a riff in unison, not as heavy as on many of the later albums but perhaps a little taster of the heavier, riff-driven style.

Waiting (Phase One)

This track begins with the protagonist waiting to be ‘born again’, perhaps hoping for redemption, or at least for life to have some meaning. The repeated line, ‘Waiting … for the day when I will crawl away’ suggests hopelessness, even a desire for death.

According to the sleeve notes for Stars Die, drummer Chris Maitland loved singing the vocal harmonies on the song, but if forced to take only one of the tracks to a desert island he would choose Colin Edwin’s bass line because, ‘it’s so hypnotic and subtle.’ Wilson’s guitar playing is another highlight, beginning with gentle strummed acoustic guitar chords, with spacey, psychedelic electric guitar which explodes towards the end in a manic solo that seems to express the frustration felt by the protagonist.

Stupid Dream (1999)

Even Less

The song begins with a single held A on the strings, the note that classical orchestras always tune to, as if the orchestra were tuning up in anticipation. Slide guitars evoke a sunlit, humid American desert landscape, similar to that evoked by Ry Cooder’s soundtrack to the 1984 movie Paris, Texas. The guitars are doubled across the stereo channels so that they appear in both ears at once, a technique used extensively on later Porcupine Tree albums, particularly on heavy metal guitars, to add richness and bite.

But instead of remaining in an American setting, the song swiftly moves to an English landscape, as the same chords move from slide guitar to elemental distorted chords, almost punk-like in the simplicity of the chord progression. Acoustic guitar and piano accompany the description of a body being washed up on a Norfolk beach, a friend who, ‘could not be reached’, who has presumably committed suicide. There follows an even more disturbing image of another body, ‘a choirboy buried on the moor.’

The song ends with a series of heavy guitar chords in ‘Drop D’ tuning, where the bottom note of the guitar is tuned down by a whole note, a technique beloved of heavy metal bands and used extensively on later Porcupine Tree albums. As such, the song marks an important transition for the band, from earlier psychedelia to later progressive metal. But Wilson has not moved away from psychedelia yet – above the brutal, visceral crunch of the heavy metal chords floats a lovely Floydian guitar solo, complete with string bends, a technique often used by David Gilmour.

Wilson reprised the song at the Royal Albert Hall in London on his To the Bone Tour in March 2018 (Track eighteen on the Home Invasion concert DVD). He dedicated the song to people who had been listening to his music before the 21st century. Channelling his inner Billy Bragg, he reminded the audience what a great rhythm guitarist he is, and by stripping the track to the bone, what a powerful song writer he is.

Don’t Hate Me

This is the final song in a trilogy of songs on Stupid Dream about unrequited love. It begins with an image of a deserted London as light snow falls. The image of a train, often elsewhere a symbol of Wilson’s nostalgia for his childhood, here represents the emptiness of the scene as no-one get on or off the train. A relationship has broken up, and weary resignation that haunts the verses of the song. The chorus is more impassioned, as the unrequited lover, who is so, ‘tired and alone’, pleads not to be hated, a plea which is moderated by the deeply sarcastic line, ‘I’m not special like you.’

This is one of Porcupine Tree’s most atmospheric songs, with a jazz-inflected interlude switching between a laid-back flute solo and a more anguished saxophone, both played by Theo Travis, moving from resignation to bitter anger. The long instrumental interlude would be perfectly suited to a film noir movie, conjuring up an atmosphere of dark streets with silhouetted figures, and cigarette smoke curling through darkened rooms. Wilson has often spoken of his songs being like short films and this is a perfect example.

Bibliography

Porcupine Tree review — a prog-rock comeback of propulsive perfection by Dominic Maxwell, The Times 14 November 2022

Notes from Porcupine Tree – Stars Die: The Delerium Years 1991–1997 (Kscope 2002)

On Track … Porcupine Tree by Nick Holmes (Sonicbond September 2021)

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Review – Deadwing Deluxe Edition by Porcupine Tree

*****

Deluxe re-issue of Porcupine Tree’s 2005 album casts new light on a classic

Deadwing is the second album in a run of three classic releases from Porcupine Tree, starting with In Absentia in 2002 and ending with Fear of a Blank Planet in 2007. It was released in the middle of that sequence, in 2005. The new Deluxe Edition on CD is housed in a handsome hardback book of around a hundred pages, including photos and artwork by Lasse Hoile and Mike Bennion, and detailed articles by Stephen Humphries. In 2017, the band’s singer, guitarist and main songwriter Steven Wilson remastered the album for release on vinyl, and that mix is included here for the first time on CD. The first CD contains the full album and the second CD includes five B-sides. The third has 13 demos, the first seven of which were recorded by Wilson, the eighth by Wilson and drummer Gavin Harrison and the rest by the full band with Richard Barbieri on keyboards and Colin Edwin on bass. The generous fourth disc is a Blu-Ray which includes: a new documentary Never Stop the Car on a Drive in the Dark – the Making of Deadwing directed by Jeremy George; the album and B-sides remastered in high resolution stereo (96/24 LPCM); a 5.1 surround sound mix including four B-sides; a concert video recorded for the German Rockpalast television series at Live Music Hall, Köln, Germany in November 2005.

The Deadwing Film Script

Many of the songs on the album relate to a film script of the same name, written by Wilson and the director Mike Bennion, with whom Wilson had collaborated, writing music for several TV commercials directed by Bennion. The film of Deadwing script was never made, although it did resurface in 2020 in a new, simpler version called And No Birds Sing. A short teaser (featuring a brief cameo of Wilson as a rough sleeper) was released on YouTube in September of that year, but to date the film hasn’t been completed.

In the meantime, the Deadwing album was released partly to help the film get made – Wilson and Bennion were having difficulty creating any interest in their script. The irony is that the album is based, as Wilson admits in the fascinating documentary in this Deluxe Edition, on a script of a film that no-one has ever seen, and on characters that are known only to Wilson and Bennion. Wilson enjoys the irony, but does admit that the problem – if there is one – is that the album is impenetrable both ‘lyrically and conceptually.’ What has made the album even more difficult to interpret – until now – is that it has never been entirely clear which of the songs on the album relate to the film script. Wilson admits that around half of the nine tracks on the album are taken from the script, including the title track, Lazarus, Open Car, and Arriving Somewhere But Not Here. He gives tantalising glimpses of parts of the plot of the film, admitting to Humphries for instance that the eerie spoken words on the title track ‘Like a cancer scare/In a dentist’s chair’ are taken directly from the script. The images and photography, which are extensively and beautifully presented in the lavish book are also almost entirely based on the film script.

In the documentary, Wilson refers to the two main characters in the script, David and Elizabeth. David works in a sound studio in Soho, London. As I mention in my book On Track … Porcupine Tree (Sonicbond Publishing, 2021) the first 15 pages of the Deadwing script were posted online, but are no longer available. For a detailed summary, please see page 86 of the book, but briefly David is seen working on the sound for a video and is horrified when he glimpses a small boy who appears mysteriously in one of the scenes he is editing. He later meets Elizabeth on a Tube train platform – it’s unclear who she is, although we are told that she is a young woman in her late twenties, with a long red coat and red high heels.

A fascinating revelation made by Wilson in the documentary is that David is the only survivor of a religious cult after the rest of them died in a mass suicide twenty years before the start of the film. He fled the cult as a child, and the opening scene of the film script shows a three-year-old boy running, barefoot, through the woods at night wearing a nightshirt. Just before this, we see the boy’s mother singing a lullaby to him; are we to assume that his mother was a member of the cult and died in the mass suicide? The song Lazarus seems to be a dialogue between the boy and his dead mother – David is mentioned by name in the song.

Wilson has often written about religion in his lyrics for Porcupine Tree, and Halo on this album is about the holier-than-thou attitude of a born-again Christian,

I’m not the same as you
Cause I’ve seen the light

Wilson has also shown his fascination with religious cults. The track Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled (Lightbulb Sun 2000) features real spoken word footage from the leader of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, 39 of whom committed suicide in March 1997 in the tragic belief that they had left their bodies to return to the ‘Level Above Human in Distant Space.’ Wilson revisited the theme in The Blind House (The Incident 2009) which is again based on a real-life case, when a police raid in 2008 on the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas led to the release of 400 children, some of whom had married the polygamist cult leader who is now serving a long prison sentence for sexual activities with minors. It’s intriguing to note that in the interview with Humphries, Wilson says that in the film script the ghosts of the dead cult members are now coming back to reclaim David. This combines Wilson’s scepticism about religion (inherited from his scientist father as Wilson says in his book Limited Edition of One (Constable 2022)) with his love of ghost stories – as shown on his solo album The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) from 2013, which is based on a series of ghost stories that Wilson wrote.

Despite the revelation about David and the cult from which he escaped, Wilson admitted to Humphries that using a film script that very few people have ever seen (although Barbieri and Edwin did read it when recording the album) could make the album ‘a little unrelatable.’ He said that ‘nobody knew who David was’. We may have to wait until the film is released to find out more about him. But the film script is not crucial to an understanding of the album and an appreciation of its emotional resonance. In a revealing section of the documentary, Wilson says that songs like Lazarus have universal themes, such as childhood nostalgia and regret, lyrical themes which have continued to haunt his solo albums including The Raven … and Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015). He modestly fails to mention the fact that the success of Lazarus (with over 18 million plays on Spotify it’s the band’s third most popular song and Wilson has played it live nearly 500 times) is partly due to the gorgeous melody and the vocals which are delivered with sweet sincerity. Critics may agonise over the exact meaning of a lyric, whereas listeners may respond to the emotional truth of a song which is revealed as much by the music as by the words.

The Demo tracks

Another revelation – perhaps more startling – is that Lazarus originally contained extra material as can be heard on the demo version on CD2. From around 2:25 to 3:10 there’s a very strange bridge section which sounds completely incongruous, much more like the early psychedelic pastiches of Porcupine Tree when the band was still Wilson’s solo project. It’s a very unusual lapse of judgment on Wilson’s part – most of his demos are very similar to the final versions, but in this case Andy Karp from the record company said that the demo version of the song ‘suddenly went haywire with a real curveball of a middle part.’ Karp and the band’s manager Andy Leff shared the same reaction to the middle section. Their role was to turn a good piece of art into a great piece of art, just as poet Ezra Pound did when editing T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922).

Another, more subtle but equally important difference between the demo and the final version of a song is Arriving Somewhere But Not Here. The demo begins with two minutes of ethereal choirs and the sound of a church organ. As Barbieri says in the documentary, Wilson asked him to add his distinctive sound design to the opening of the track, replacing the demo version with a ‘slowly building backdrop’ that leads much more effectively to the ‘dramatic moment’ when the main guitar theme first appears. Barbieri adds the ticking of a grandfather clock, electronic bleeps, backwards piano and a synth patch called Arab Soft Synth to create a richly enigmatic soundscape which creates, as he told Humphries, a ‘serene but portentous mood.’

The other demos are mostly versions of tracks which appear on the final album or as B-sides which are already reviewed in detail in On Track … Porcupine Tree. The B-sides on CD 2 are also covered in the book, mostly as tracks on the Stars Die compilation (see pages 130 – 132). There are however four new demo songs in the Deluxe Edition which aren’t reviewed elsewhere:

Godfearing (Wilson) [04:57]

This track has been available for about ten years on Wilson’s SoundCloud account, where he says that he’s not sure which album it belongs to, ‘while it shares lyrical themes with the songs on In Absentia, one of the melodies seems to relate to another piece from [the] Deadwing era.’ It now seems he has decided that it belongs to Deadwing.

This is an archetypal Porcupine Tree track from the band’s later era, with opening metal riffs that could have come from Swedish prog metal band Opeth (with whom Wilson was working around this time); lovely delicate vocals in the verses contrasting with an epic earworm of a chorus; a very heavy riff that could have come from Deadwing; a contemplative section with heavily echoed piano; imaginative use of hammered dulcimer and a taste of Mellotron … all beautifully combined into less than five minutes. It’s good that the track has finally found a home on an official release.

Vapour Trails (Wilson) [03.53]

Not to be confused with the single Vapour Trail Lullaby which was written before the sessions for In Absentia but wasn’t released until 2010, when it was given away as a single with copies of Wilson’s solo DVD Insurgentes.

The song is a reminder (if one is needed) of Wilson’s supreme ability to write a simple, heartfelt ballad – recent examples include 12 Things I Forgot from his solo album The Future Bites (2021) or Of The New Day from the Porcupine Tree album Closure / Continuation (2022). Its status as a demo is shown by the slightly strained vocals, and the very simple arrangement mostly based around strummed acoustic guitar. But there’s some lovely George Harrison-like guitar later in the song, and at 3:30 there’s a heart-stopping moment when the instruments briefly drop out, leaving emotive multi-layered vocals hanging in the air like perfume.

Instrumental Demo 1 (Porcupine Tree) [05.19]

This is one of five demos featuring the complete band. Wilson had previously presented the band with songs in the form of completed demos on which he played and sang all the parts, but on Deadwing he was beginning to relax control a little and allow other band members into the writing process. On the main album, Halo and Glass Arm Shattering are written by the whole band, and The Start Of Something Beautiful is co-written with Gavin Harrison.

This song is notable for a typically melodic, wide ranging bass line from Colin Edwin in the verse, robust and intelligent drumming from Harrison, some spacious soundscaping from Barbieri, and rocky guitar from Wilson.

Instrumental Demo 2 (Porcupine Tree) [05.23]

Harrison says that the danger of a whole band writing together in a room is that they end up playing for half an hour in E major, but this song features an uplifting and imaginative sequence of key changes from around 1:15 which lift the song beyond the most basic of demos. With more work, this could have been turned into a classic Porcupine Tree song. From around 3:30 Wilson shows off his skills as a guitarist and at 4:00 Barbieri adds evocative keyboards.

The Surround Sound Mix

The Deluxe Edition provides an opportunity to hear Deadwing in a surround sound mix in 5.1 only – it was much later that Wilson began to mix in the more immersive and sophisticated Dolby Atmos format. The first Porcupine Tree album to benefit from 5.1 surround sound was In Absentia, mixed by Elliot Scheiner. Wilson worked with Scheiner on the 5.1 mix of Deadwing and by the next album Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) he had learned the art so well that his surround sound mix was nominated for a Grammy award, as was his mix of the next album The Incident (2009). Wilson has since become the go-to surround sound mixer for classic albums by bands such as King Crimson, Roxy Music, Jethro Tull, Yes, Gentle Giant, XTC and Tears For Fears. More recently he mixed his latest solo album The Future Bites (2021) and the new Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation (2022) in Dolby Atmos as well, adding more precise placement of instruments in the surround sound picture and height information as well.

The 5.1 mix provides a coherent, immersive experience that creates a unique sound world, strengthening some of the weaker tracks by drawing them into a creative whole. Backing vocals become much better defined in the surround sound image. Heavy metal guitar riffs are visceral. Fizzing synths that are hidden in the stereo mix lurk menacingly. Excellent use is made of the rear speakers, with the spoken word passages in the title track leaping out to startle the listener. Two tracks in particular benefit from the mix. Mellotron Scratch brings out the beauty and the pain of the song. The bass drum at the start is much more prominent, the syncopated rhythm creating a deliciously uneasy effect. The harmony voices are gorgeous. Later in the song guitars and drums join in a moment of sudden robustness as the bass drum returns. The final track, Glass Arm Shattering, provides a lovely relaxation of tension after the visceral onslaught of much of the rest of the album. In stereo, the simplicity of the track is what is most noticeable after the proggy polyrhythms of the previous track, Start Of Something Beautiful. The surround sound mix turns the track into more of an epic, a climax like Eclipse, the closing track of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. The track begins with nostalgic vinyl crackles, which lead to lush drums and electronics. Slide guitars in the rear speakers add to the richness of the picture, and the multi-layered vocals take the listener to a new heights of emotion. The track ends with a touch of subtle humour, the sound of a stylus in a crackly groove on a record circling around the surround sound image turning the whole room into a vast record player.

Conclusion

Deadwing is in some ways a transitional album. It consolidated the distinctive Porcupine Tree blueprint, a hybrid of progressive metal riffs, melodic strength and rich vocal harmonies that had been a feature of the previous album, In Absentia. Perhaps what Deadwing lacks compared to that album is conceptual coherence. The next album, Fear Of A Blank Planet used the same musical formula and added a very strong concept, making it the band’s masterpiece. But Deadwing does contain two classic Porcupine Tree tracks, Arriving Somewhere But Not Here and Lazarus, and most of the other material is strong. The Deluxe Edition adds a great deal to the enjoyment of the album, an insight into the creative process and an excellent surround sound mix. So, **** for the music itself and an extra * for the rest of the new package. Following the release of the In Absentia Deluxe Edition in 2020, a Deluxe Edition of Fear Of A Blank Planet would complete the trilogy nicely.

Track Listing

CD1 Deadwing (2018 remaster)

1 Deadwing [09:46]

2 Shallow [04:17]

3 Lazarus [04:19]

4 Halo [04:39]

5 Arriving Somewhere But Not Here [12:02]

6 Mellotron Scratch [06:57]

7 Open Car [03:44]

8 Start Of Something Beautiful [07:43]

9 Glass Arm Shattering [06:08]

CD2 B-Sides

1 Revenant [03:05]

2 So Called Friend [04:49]

3 Shesmovedon [04:55]

4 Mother And Child Divided [05:00]

5 Half Light  [06:38]

CD3 Demos

1 Arriving Somewhere But Not Here (demo) [13:03]

2 Godfearing (demo) [04:57]

3 Lazarus (demo) [04:10]

4 Open Car (demo) [05:08]

5 Vapour Trails (demo) [03:53]

6 Shallow (demo) [04:15]

7 Deadwing (demo) [10:35]

8 Mother And Child Divided (demo) [05:02]

9 Instrumental Demo 1 [05:19]

10 Halo (demo) [04:50]

11 Instrumental Demo 2 [05:23]

12 So Called Friend (demo) [05:01]

13 Glass Arm Jam [04:19]

Blu-ray

Documentary Film, Rockpalast Broadcast & Extras

1 Never Stop the Car on a Drive in the Dark (Deadwing documentary [54:20]

2 Lazarus (promo video) [04:19]

3 Deadwing (remastered album 96/24 LPCM stereo) [59:37]

4 Deadwing B-sides (96/24 LPCM stereo) [25:25]

5 Deadwing 5.1 surround sound mix (including 4 bonus tracks) 48/24 (2005 by Elliot Scheiner and Steven Wilson) [59:37]

6 Additional 5.1 mixes of B-sides Revenant, Mother and Child Divided, Half-Light and Shesmovedon [19.47]

Rockpalast WDR TV broadcast:

7 Intro [00:35]

8 Blackest Eyes [04:33] In Absentia

9 Lazarus [03:58] Deadwing

10 Futile [02:31] In Absentia bonus track

11 Interview [06:02]

12 Mother And Child Divided [04:50] Deadwing B-side

13 So Called Friend [05:00] Deadwing B-side

14 Arriving Somewhere But Not Here [12:24] Deadwing

15 Sound Of Muzak [05:06] In Absentia

16 Interview 2 [01:20]

17 Start Of Something Beautiful [07:24] Deadwing

18 Halo [05:03] Deadwing

19 Interview 3 [03:35]

20 Radioactive Toy [06:05] On The Sunday Of Life

21 Trains [07.18] In Absentia

References

Never Stop the Car on a Drive in the Dark – the Making of Deadwing directed by Jeremy George

Deadwing: The History and track-by-track by Stephen Humphries (Deadwing book)

Twitter @PorcupineTree – first draft of Deadwing Script

On Track … Porcupine Tree: Every Album, Every Song by Nick Holmes (SonicBond Publishing September 2021)

Limited Edition Of One – How To Succeed In The Music Industry Without Being Part of The Mainstream by Steven Wilson with Mick Wall (Constable, an imprint of Little, Brown April 2022)  

Godfearing on Wilson’s SoundCloud account

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Review – Opeth

Friday 18 November

Eventim Apollo, London

****

Swedish prog metal band celebrate three decades of music with audience choices

A work colleague was bemused when I told her I was going to London on Friday to see a prog metal band, ‘didn’t you do that last week?’ she said. I explained that I had been to see Porcupine Tree, who are prog rock rather than prog metal. But both bands transcend their genre labels, as demonstrated in this concert by opener Ghost of Perdition which begins with death metal vocals and guitars but soon embraces pastoral folk. Both bands also feature leaders who are endlessly restless, refusing to repeat themselves. As Opeth’s leader Mikael Åkerfeldt said during the gig, he could easily have rewritten the band’s classic album Blackwater Park (2001) for every subsequent album, just as Steven Wilson could have carried on writing new versions of Porcupine Tree’s classic Fear of a Blank Planet (2007). But both men have refused to compromise, sometimes alienating fans but also gaining new ones by constantly changing. The two men have also been close friends since Wilson worked on Blackwater Park and more recently their Storm Corrosion album (2012).

Åkerfeldt did please fans however by allowing them to choose the setlist by picking one song from each of the band’s 13 studio albums to celebrate Opeth’s 30th anniversary. This led to the slightly strange choice of Black Rose Immortal from the 1996 album Morningrise. Åkerfeldt admitted that his aim was to write a song for the first album which was over twenty minutes long. It wasn’t ready in time so he put it on the second album. He conceded that he built the track by stitching together short sections. The resulting song is episodic almost to the point of being disjointed, but the band made a good effort at playing it live for the first time.

Elsewhere, long-form structures worked much better, as on The Moor (from 1999’s Still Life) with its dreamy opening followed by driving metal riffs, and closing number Deliverance (from the 2002 album of the same name) with its mesmerising syncopated final section. And throughout the concert Åkerfeldt’s endlessly inventive songwriting was illustrated by songs that – remarkably – he began writing at the age of 19, obtaining the band’s first record deal by sending a cassette to a record company with 15 seconds of rehearsal footage on it. His amazing ear for unusual chord progressions and rich harmonies was evident throughout, particularly in the beautiful harmony vocals for Eternal Rains will Come (from Pale Communion 2014).

Åkerfeldt has worked very hard to get Opeth to its current level of success, and he is obviously enjoying it; his onstage persona was relaxed, taking time to tune his guitar and chat amiably to the audience between songs. His singing voice was equally relaxed, his death metal growls rich and evocative and his clean vocals searing and potent, often within the same song. The audience were in good voice too, joyfully singing along when Åkerfeldt played a short excerpt from a song by another great singer – George Michael’s Faith. New drummer Waltteri Väyrynen (Paradise Lost, Bodom After Midnight and Bloodbath) was equally relaxed, and seems to have fitted into his new band really well already, happily embracing Opeth’s prog metal, blues, jazz and folk with equal aplomb.

The video screens were vertically split into three, meaning that from the balcony seats it looked at times as if Väyrynen and keyboard player Joakim Svalberg were swimming in a sea of fire or water. The images occasionally felt slightly generic but there was a stunning video for The Devil’s Orchard (from Heritage 2011) with a terrifying opening image of a woman falling from a high building into the abyss, matching the existential despair of the Nietzschean cry, ‘God is Dead.’

Like so many gigs, this one was delayed due to Covid, so the band are now in their 32nd year. Let’s hope that Åkerfeldt and friends continue to record and perform great music for many years to come.

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Review – Porcupine Tree

Friday 11 November 2022

Wembley Arena, London

Triumphant return of the band to London after 12 year hiatus

*****

Image credit: Mike Holmes

Last time Porcupine Tree played in London was just over 12 years ago, in October 2010. As band leader and main songwriter Steven Wilson recounts in detail in his new book Limited Edition of One, what should have been a career highlight performing in front of a sold-out Royal Albert Hall left him feeling empty. He walked away to pursue an increasingly successful solo career, leaving fans and critics wondering whether the band would ever record together or play live again. Then in June 2022 a new album appeared, Closure/Continuation followed by a tour that ended, appropriately in London again, at a packed Wembley Arena.

It would be presumptuous to assume any intimate knowledge of Wilson’s inner psyche, but he seemed to be in a very different mood this time. The fact that the band have already announced they are playing more dates at summer festivals next year suggests that he’s enjoying himself again. He seemed relaxed and happy to be onstage. He had every right to be. The sound was very good, the video back projections were varied and interesting, the lighting impressive, and the audience attentive. Most importantly, Wilson was in excellent voice, and the band at times were so locked in with each other they felt like the limbs of a single creature rather than individuals.

During Collapse the Light into Earth, mobile phone torches were raised by the audience, gently swaying in a sea of lights. Wilson, playing keyboards in this gentle, melancholy ballad was distracted by such a moving sight, saying that he forgot the words as a result. Some audience members turned away from the stage to survey the communal emotion. Near the end, Wilson tried to introduce a song and the persistent applause stopped him from speaking. He has been on a 30 year journey, always carving his out own path but sometimes wondering why his exceptional songwriting ability, fine musicianship, stunning work as a producer and re-mixer and surround-sound guru, deep insights into the contemporary condition and ability to attract virtuoso musicians to work with him have not resulted in the commercial success he deserves. So it was poignant that he chose to play Buying New Soul, one of Porcupine Tree’s hidden treasures, which describes Wilson’s continuing fight against the music industry – ‘I still rage and wage my little war’. The song ends with the depressing concept of selling out, of buying a ‘new soul at the start of every year’. Wilson no longer needs to worry about compromising his artistic integrity – his last two solo albums and the new Porcupine Tree album all made the top five in the UK. And he played to over 12,000 fans tonight, despite mostly being ignored by the media, television and radio.

The new album represents the first time Wilson collaborated with other band members in writing songs, and the concert felt like a true band effort rather than Wilson with a backing band. Richard Barbieri on keyboards provided his usual atmospheric synth washes but also some prominent solos, worthy of Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright. Gavin Harrison on drums was subtle and loose-limbed, organic and human, never showy but always virtuosic. Wilson jovially announced the two new members of the touring band, American musicians Randy McStine and Nate Navarro as coming from New York and Texas (which apparently are now part of the British Isles … who knew?) McStine was a revelation, a superb guitarist who provided distinctive solos. He not only contributed backing vocals but at times shared lead vocal duties with Wilson, testament to the quality of his singing, and the deserved confidence Wilson placed in him. Navarro brought tasteful bass playing, successfully filling the gap left by the band’s previous bass player Colin Edwin. The performances were excellent throughout, but highlights included Sleep Together and Halo when the band locked tightly into Harrison’s drumming to create rhythmic perfection. And it was a joy to hear the long prog rock anthem Anesthetize played live in full, just as Nick Mason recently toured the Pink Floyd epic Echoes .

The new album was well-represented and the tracks stood up well in comparison with older classics from Fear of a Blank Planet and In Absentia. It might have been better to have grouped together more of the tracks from different albums for the sake of stylistic consistency but that was a very minor issue. The backing videos added a greater emotional depth to many of the songs. Herd Culling showed a wolf drenched in blood-red light, a miniature horror film.

The official video for Herd Culling

The video for Sleep Together depicted multiple robotic creatures like the monster in Alien. The title track from Fear of a Blank Planet illustrated the song as an anthem for doomed youth. Perhaps the most moving of all was a new black and white video for Dignity based on the lyrics ‘Lost soul/Camped at the side of the road’ reminding us that rough sleepers still live on the street in the twenty-first century.

Wilson said the band would end the concert with a medley of rock classics including Sweet Home Alabama, Free Bird and Purple Rain. Before the audience recovered from its surprise at this, Wilson announced that the band would instead play the nearest that any of his ‘failures’ has been to being a hit, Trains, which has now been streamed over 27 million times on Spotify. Wilson has proved that he no longer needs to worry about ‘buying a new soul’ every year; his refusal to compromise has finally led to chart success, a loyal and devoted following, a reputation as one of the best re-mixers … and one of the best live experiences around.

Nick Holmes is the author of On Track … Porcupine Tree (2021) described by DPRP as ‘an essential purchase for fans of the band.’

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Review – Porcupine Tree Closure/Continuation

*****

Porcupine Tree return after 12 years’ hiatus with their new album which reached number 2 in the UK charts

Pink Floyd once satirised the music industry executive who said, ‘You gotta get an album out/You owe it to the people’ (Have a Cigar from their 1975 album Wish You Were Here). When Porcupine Tree went on an extended hiatus after their last concert in 2010, there was no pressure on them from a record company to ‘get an album out’. Band leader Steven Wilson had already launched what became an increasingly successful solo career. The other members of what is now known in copyright terms as ‘Porcupine Three’ were also pursuing their own careers. Keyboard player Richard Barbieri released a series of solo albums, most recently the troubled lockdown masterpiece Under a Spell. Drummer Gavin Harrison toured with King Crimson and became a member of The Pineapple Thief, and recorded a superb jazz fusion album Chemical Reactions with bass player Antoine Fafard.

In the meantime, another bass player was writing new material with Gavin Harrison – Steven Wilson himself. As long ago as 2012, Steven went round to Gavin’s house for a cup of tea and a chat. Gavin suggested that they should jam together, and the only instrument in Gavin’s home studio that resembled a lead guitar was a bass guitar. Pragmatism is the mother of creativity, so Steven picked up the bass and played it like a guitar player. Many years later, when promoting his most recent solo album, last year’s The Future Bites he said that he had fallen out of love with the guitar as the main source of his creativity, preferring to write on keyboards, particularly analogue synthesisers. When asked about the possible return of Porcupine Tree, he naturally always deflected the interviewer towards the solo work that he was promoting at the time, although a careful re-reading of some of those interviews now reveals that he was sometimes dropping hints that Porcupine Tree might come back at some stage, perhaps as a side-project to his solo career.

So, without any pressure or expectation, the three band members quietly wrote an album, now released under the intriguing title Closure/Continuation, suggesting that this could be the final chapter of the Porcupine Tree saga, or it could be the start of a new chapter. The lack of commercial or artistic pressure meant that the band were able to work in a completely new way. Previously, Steven Wilson had delivered songs to the band as fully completed demos which the band rerecorded. For the latest album, for the first time Steven wrote songs with the other band members, and all the instruments and vocals were performed by the three of them without any external collaborators. When their work was complete, they then offered it to several record companies, eventually going with the independent label Music for Nations who describe themselves as the ‘naughty corner of Sony Music UK, proving people wrong since 1983.’

The album has seven tracks, which are reviewed in more detail below, although streaming versions add another three tracks, Population Three, Never Have and Love in the Past Tense that are taken from the Deluxe Edition Box Set. The album is unusual in the band’s catalogue in the there is no over-arching concept as there is with many of their previous albums such as Fear of a Blank Planet. Steven Wilson’s own solo albums to date are based on a strong concept, except for the first album Insurgentes released in 2008. Perhaps the fact that songs were written piecemeal over a long period of time, and by all three band members rather than Steven Wilson on his own, meant that a concept was not appropriate this time, although the lyrics are all written by Steven Wilson and express some of the concerns he has visited on previous albums. To use a literary analogy, each song can be viewed as a self-contained short story rather than a chapter from a novel.

01 Harridan (Harrison, Wilson)

The title of this song has caused some online commentators to reach for their dictionary to discover that it means a haggard old woman. It’s an insult, or as the Oxford English Dictionary politely puts it, ‘usually a term of vituperation.’ Perhaps it leads listeners to expect a misogynistic rant, but instead the song is addressed to a man, making the term neutral. The man in question is a ‘gold man’, perhaps like the mythical King Midas whose every touch turned objects into gold, with a ‘silver tongue’ suggesting a powerful man who uses his eloquence to hide the truth which he keeps to himself. The truth in this case is that ‘you can only save yourself’. The chorus refers to hiding our cuts and our hurt from the world, appearing strong even at the point of death, ‘when we bite the dust’. The central character of the song could be a politician of the like that is dismantled in the third song on the album ‘Rats Return’, but it’s not made clear.

But the song is not completely bleak. The bridge section is much more tender, a gorgeous depiction of the ‘time of the almost rain’ which the next song Of the New Day reveals to be dawn. The beauty of the scene is poignantly combined with an expression of deep loss and regret; having ‘gone to earth’ to find love, the protagonist laments lost love, ‘and what is left without you?’ Wilson sings with a remarkable tenderness here, expressing a new vulnerability in his voice which seems to have begun on his previous solo album The Future Bites, showing a new confidence in his ability to use his voice as an expressive instrument.

The song was chosen as the first single from the album, and it was a good choice to relaunch the band on an unsuspecting world. It contains all the elements that became associated with the later Porcupine Tree, metal riffs, rich sound design, a wide range of dynamics, strong melodies, evocative lyrics and a sense of development as the track progresses. But there’s a new simplicity on this album, with pared-down production that bears a close relationship to the production style on The Future Bites. There’s less in the way of overt musical virtuosity than on previous Porcupine Tree albums, except unsurprisingly from Gavin Harrison on drums. At a recent Q&A session with the band in Leeds, Wilson and Barbieri amusingly recounted the arguments they had about who was the worst musician in the band, each trying to claim the crown and both (rightly) agreeing that Harrison is definitely the best musician in the band.

The track starts with Wilson playing perhaps the funkiest bass line ever heard on a Porcupine Tree record, with lovely ambient keyboards from Barbieri and fierce vocals from Wilson. In common with some of the other tracks on the album, the chorus is very short, giving a real sense of urgency. There’s also a yearning quality in the chords that lead up to the chorus. The song seems to have reached its end only about three minutes in after the contemplative bridge section, but it gathers itself again with fizzing guitar and a thunderous metal riff with driving guitar chords. The sound drops out with bubbling synths flying across the stereo picture, followed by a whimsical jazz section with Wilson almost scat singing in falsetto above. Another driving chromatic section follows with a triumphant return of the chorus and its matching riff. The coda to the song is a repeat of the bridge section, ending on an unresolved chord which disappears into noise. An inspiring ending to a superb opening song, announcing the group’s exultant return as if In Absentia was released only a year or two ago rather than 20 years ago.

02 Of The New Day (Wilson)

After the onslaught of the previous song, there follows a gentle ballad which expresses hope and optimism at the breaking of dawn, described by the Greek poet Homer as ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, a memorable image of a time here described by Wilson as ‘the hour of almost rain/When night becomes the day.’ It’s an image of rebirth, but as this is a Porcupine Tree song there are ‘tinges of darkness around the edges’ as Wilson admitted in a Twitter Listening Party with Tim Burgess of The Charlatans on 29 June. The darkness here seems to be the protagonist’s old life, which is still there despite the breaking dawn, ‘the old days that line up behind/The monolith of the new day.’

Although it’s superficially a simple song, behind the balladry lies the rhythmic genius of Gavin Harrison. Apparently Wilson told the band’s drummer that he wanted to write a song that had multiple time changes. This means that the song has a slightly stop-start feel but it’s so well executed that after the initial slight shock of the time changes it soon resides in the brain as a classic Steven Wilson ballad.

03 Rats Return (Harrison, Wilson)

This song is about politicians who ‘leave their principles at the door’ who ‘purge [their] guilt for nameless hoards’ (pedants will note that the correct spelling of the word is ‘hordes’). The idea of rats returning ties in with the more common image of rats leaving a sinking ship; in the song the rats are presumably returning to celebrate their complete control over the places they have laid waste by their policies. The hint of a nautical image becomes more of a theme as the album progresses.

The idea of psychopaths running society is something that preoccupies Wilson; in the video for the track Eminent Sleaze on The Future Bites he plays a character who represents the ultimate extremes of Capitalism as he watches the world end, leaving him as the sole survivor.

In Rats Return, the line ‘a conscience won’t help you win the war’ perfectly encapsulates the level of psychopathy that politicians often appear to need in order to be leaders. It’s a concept explored by journalist and broadcaster Jon Ronson in his fascinating book, The Psychopath Test, which looks at the lack of empathy in public figures,

“Serial killers ruin families,’ shrugged Bob. ‘Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson (Picador 2012)

Wilson makes it clear that he is referring to real political and military leaders when he lists ‘Genghis K’ (Genghis Kahn, the military leader who was responsible for the deaths of millions), ‘Pinochet’ (the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet) and ‘Mao Tse Tung’ (Chairman Mao, responsible for countless Chinese deaths during the Cultural Revolution).

The song is another exercise in rhythmic mastery from Harrison. On Twitter he pointed out that the rhythmic pattern is so complex it takes, ‘at least half the song before people realise that there is a repeat of a four-bar syncopation, in which every bar is different.’ As a result, the rhythm is ‘spiky’, which suits the song’s sentiments perfectly. The main guitar riff could have come from the progressive metal style of some of the songs on the previous three Porcupine Tree albums, but the song also has a contemporary feel due to the sparse production. It feels like another classic Porcupine Tree song in the making.

04 Dignity (Barbieri, Wilson)

This song addresses one of Wilson’s favourite themes, the role of ambition in our lives and the failure to achieve our dreams – the ‘stupid dream’ described in the album of the same name in 1999. On the Twitter Listening Party he said that Dignity describes a guy who ‘really used to be someone’, a film star or a CEO who is now living on the street, and ‘all the pathos that goes with that downfall.’ But there is also hope – the central character retains his dignity despite his downfall, ‘your dignity will never go and your mind is pretty sound’

The song includes a reference to the final section of T. S. Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land, What the thunder said, in the line ‘Tell yourself it’s just what the thunder said.’ The first part of that section of the poem refers to the aridity and sterility of life in the 20th century (the poem was written in 1922, so is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year). The poem ends with the Sanskrit word ‘Shantih’ repeated three times. The word Shantih, used at the end of Hindu religious texts the Upanishads, means peace. Eliot himself in his Notes to the poem described it as the equivalent of the Christian concept of ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’ or the Peace that God brings. In the context of the song, which has no overt religious message, the fact that the poem ends on an ineffably positive note could suggest that if the protagonist in the song ignores what the thunder said, and instead follows the final message of the poem, this could provide hope despite his downfall. Whether Wilson had the poem in mind when he wrote the song is unclear, although the final section also has a reference to hooded hordes swarming over endless plains, which could relate to the anonymous ‘nameless hordes’ referred to in Rats Return.

The song starts with the sound of children playing, rather like opening of First Regret from Wilson’s fourth solo album Hand.Cannot.Erase, a brief evocation of the nostalgic theme that has often appeared in his work. A haunting wordless vocal, pure in tone, is provided by the Swedish singer and multi-instrumentalist Lisen Rylander Löve who has worked with Richard Barbieri. A cascading rock guitar line leads to a syncopated vocal line with folky backing vocals provided by Wilson himself. The chorus has a soaring lead synth line which rises in gentle euphoria. The chord structure uses a classic songwriting technique beloved of The Beatles and others, the change from major to minor on the words ‘you stare at the sun’, here describing a moment of hope as the sun breaks through, followed by a return to melancholy on the final word ‘done’. These chord progressions give the song an instant feeling of warm nostalgia, as if the song had already been heard many times before in a dream.

05 Herd Culling (Harrison, Barbieri, Wilson)

The track opens with the visceral lines, ‘Son, go fetch the rifle now/There’s something in the yard’, throwing us immediately into a compelling psychodrama. As a lyricist, Steven has a poet or script writer’s ability to enter a story in medias res, half way through a story, the nature of which is gradually revealed as the song progresses, teasing the listener to extract the meaning of the song. In a fascinating and very detailed interview by the ever-perceptive Anil Prasad of Innerviews.org, Steven Wilson revealed the meaning of this song. He later retracted, saying he would prefer listeners to make up their own minds, so those who prefer their views not to be influenced by the lyric writer’s thoughts should skip to the next paragraph now. Wilson told Prasad that the song was inspired by the story of Skinwalker Ranch, near Ballard, Utah. Several accounts suggest that the ranch has been plagued by paranormal activities and UFOs, and a slew of books, films and documentaries have been published about it. The song describes the family’s attempts to defend themselves against aliens, ‘strange gods above the earth’ who may have landed to ‘cull a herd’ of cattle on the ranch. He told Prasad, ‘I remain skeptical [sic] when it comes to the UFO stuff and government coverups. But I love the stories.’ His fascination with ghost stories led him to write a collection of them that made up his third solo album, The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) released in 2013. On that album he used the stories to illustrate his thoughts about the human condition, and emotions such as regret and feelings of loss, rather than a scientific exploration of the existence or otherwise of ghosts. His scepticism is echoed in the chorus of the song, which consists of the single word ‘liar’, resentfully muttered at first then viciously spat out as his venom increases.

06 Walk the Plank (Barbieri, Wilson)

Another song about the corruption of power in the 21st century. On the Twitter Listening Party, Richard Barbieri described the song as being about ‘the sort of characters that are causing global trouble, a sign-of-the times commentary’. The nautical imagery is much more overt than on Rats Return; this time the rats have abandoned the sunken ship and ‘will never find their way back again.’

The song is very unusual in the Porcupine Tree canon in that it features almost entirely keyboards and drums, with very little if any guitar. To an extent, it shares the fiercely electronic sound of some of the songs on The Future Bites, particularly Eminent Sleaze although ironically much of that song was recorded using real instruments. If some of the songs on this new album feel like closure, finishing a chapter in the band’s previous history, this one feels forward-looking to new territories the band might explore in future if they carry on writing and recording together. Interestingly, on Twitter Richard Barbieri described the track as ‘the joker in the pack… if it went further it wouldn’t be Porcupine Tree.’ Steven Wilson said that if the band did work together again they would probably push towards a more keyboard-based sound with less prominence given to the guitar.

07 Chimera’s Wreck (Harrison, Wilson)

On Twitter, Wilson described this as ‘perhaps the most personal song on the album.’ It addresses a subject that has often troubled him, the nature of success and what we imagine that would look like when we are young. The ‘chimera’ described here is the illusion of the future, ‘what we imagine we want from life when we’re young probably wouldn’t have made us happy anyway.’ As mentioned above this was the theme of the Stupid Dream album, and it was also the theme of one of the hidden treasures of the Porcupine Tree back catalogue, ‘Buying New Soul’ which was recorded during the sessions for Lightbulb Sun which was released in 2000. In that song, Wilson describes his battle with the recording industry and his attempt to retain artistic integrity, ‘I still rage and wage my little war’ – but it ends with the depressing concept of selling out, of buying a ‘new soul at the start of every year’.

The personal nature of the song is emphasised by the reference to Wilson’s father, who passed away in 2011, and to whom he dedicated his second solo album Grace for Drowning, which was released later that year. Wilson began working on Chimera’s Wreck shortly after that, and the image of his father smiling at a child encapsulates their relationship in one short line. The reference to ‘A new town in the 60s’ is presumably Wilson’s home town of Hemel Hempstead, England. The new part of the existing town was completed in 1962, ‘out of concrete a design made for tomorrow’, and Wilson himself was born five years later in 1967.

The song uses sea imagery as on other parts of the album. It’s interesting that some of the imagery and language is quite archaic, almost arcane at times. This contrasts with the use of language on Wilson’s last two solo albums, which is much more direct. The final verse of this song refers to slipping the ‘wreck’ into a bottle, which presumably refers to the old practice of putting a model ship into a bottle. In this case the wrecked ship that has washed up on a shore is perhaps sealed in a bottle to because it’s no longer needed – a hopeful note on which to end the album. The robust backing vocals that appear at just over two minutes into the track have the feel of a sea shanty, and giving the song a nautical feel, a curious throwback to the 19th century. Musically, a strange but perhaps valid comparison is the music of Van der Graaf Generator, and in particular another epic track with a nautical theme, A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers from the 1971 album Pawn Hearts. Chimera’s Wreck shares the driving, repeated riffs of many of the Van der Graaf Generator songs, and their episodic nature, making it the most prog-rock song on the album.

Wilson has said that this is the best Porcupine Tree album, along with Fear of a Blank Planet and In Absentia. He also admits that ‘time will tell.’ It’s certainly by far the most collaborative album the band have ever released. The lack of an over-arching concept perhaps makes it more difficult to grasp initially than many of the previous albums, but individual tracks are very strong and as with most of Steven Wilson’s work it takes a while to give up its secrets, so repeated listens are recommended. It also maintains the consistently excellent levels of production that have characterised Wilson’s work for decades now, both as a producer and as an expert remixer of classic albums. Let’s hope that the new album, to quote one of the band’s own song titles, is the ‘Start of Something Beautiful’ rather than a final coda to their work.

For a detailed, track-by-track analysis of the previous 10 studio albums, bonus tracks, live albums and compilations see Porcupine Tree On Track by Nick Holmes, published in September 2021 by Sonicbond.

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Porcupine Tree – Hidden Treasures

Excellent songs that didn’t make the final cut

Some very strong songs were left off Porcupine Tree’s ten studio albums for reasons of space, changes of style … or in at least one case due to what the band’s leader Steven Wilson now regards as a mistake on his part.

I discovered some of these while writing my new book On Track … Porcupine Tree, a detailed analysis of the band’s songs. Many fans will already know them all, but to others I hope they will provide unexpected moments of joy.

The Sound of No-One Listening

This song starts with ominous soundscaping and sound effects, including the sound of an ice cream van, which has become a common horror film trope, though it may have a sense of nostalgia for some listeners. Although the band may have changed style by the time it was recorded, it’s an excellent track that stands up very well in retrospect, with a simple compelling bass riff and a lovely flute motif. Synth arpeggios provide a glittering, hopeful backdrop, as the song reaches a climax with very energetic drumming before falling back into a darkly disturbing noise-scape again.

Men of Wood

Steven Wilson said he found it difficult to find a home for this track. It was considered for two albums and as a single, but didn’t quite fit the band’s changing style, ‘It was almost a throwback to (the band’s) psychedelic pop, and that just wasn’t quite right – it was a context thing.’ The theme is the vacuity of modern society, sharing a sentiment with T. S. Eliot’s poem, ‘The Hollow Men’. The song begins with a dirty-sounding guitar, then heads for a memorable chorus with a nicely psychedelic key-change, giving it a rather wistful feel.

Buying New Soul

This track was recorded in writing sessions at Foel Studios, Wales, in March 2000, just after Porcupine Tree’s sixth studio album Lightbulb Sun was completed. It’s a gorgeous, poignant song with a haunting chorus. It follows the theme of the band’s fifth album Stupid Dream, the difficulty of balancing artistic integrity and commercial success. A highly personal song, it reflects Steven Wilson’s continuing fight against the music industry – ‘I still rage and wage my little war’ – but it ends with the depressing concept of selling out, of buying a ‘new soul at the start of every year’. The circling synthesizer motif that opens and closes the song perfectly matches the melancholy lyric and jazz-like upright bass. There is one moment of rage, but the feeling is generally one of resignation.

Cure for Optimism

This is a Steven Wilson solo performance at his home studio, No Man’s Land. The meaning of the song is just out of reach, but the track is still very evocative, with ghostly echoed piano motifs and subtle acoustic guitars. Mental health appears to be a theme here. The reference to a ‘serpent on a mobile phone’ could suggest a record company executive.

Drown With Me

In an interview in 2020, Steven Wilson told Lasse Hoile that he thought this song was going to be ‘one of the highlights’ of In Absentia, the band’s seventh studio album. He replaced it with ‘Prodigal’, ‘which I think is one of the weaker songs’, although he stressed this was a very personal opinion that others might disagree with. The reason for the substitution was that he felt ‘Prodigal’ was a better recording, although he regretted the decision later. ‘Drown With Me’ is a gorgeous, upbeat song in which the music contrasts sharply with the lyrics. The protagonist’s plan to drown the song’s addressee and her family seems to refer to the world of serial killers, one of the main themes of In Absentia.

Futile

This is the strongest example of the band’s interest in the music of Swedish heavy metal band, Meshuggah. The band’s drummer Gavin Harrison told Lasse Hoile that he wanted to write a Meshuggah-inspired track, that he could use as a challenge at his drum clinics, as he was finding it hard to play heavy metal. Gavin invited Steven Wilson to add guitar parts to the demo, resulting in ‘one of the heaviest pieces we ever recorded’. Lyrically, we may be back in the world of the serial killer that is so strong on In Absentia, ‘You were the one that made her cry … the world went black … lost my head.’ The chorus is fiercely dark, the metallic guitars almost burying the vocals. What makes the song remarkable is the contrast between the main guitar riff’s ferocity and the yearning delicacy of the backing vocals.

Nil Recurring

This and the next song were recorded during the sessions for Porcupine Tree’s ninth studio album Fear of a Blank Planet, which many fans consider to be their best. Both tracks feature on the band’s 2007 EP Nil Recurring. The title track of the EP is an instrumental featuring King Crimson’s Robert Fripp on lead guitar. After two minutes of guitar tapping and heavy riffing, a lovely, spacious breakdown highlights Colin Edwin’s bass and Richard Barbieri’s keyboards. Then, at around 3:20, the track gathers momentum, and a lovely riff cuts across a punchy one-note bass section. At around five minutes in, the opening echoed tapped-guitar theme returns, with a manic guitar solo and further heavy riffing, until the track suddenly dissolves.

What Happens Now?

This song’s protagonist seems to be suffering an existential crisis, rather like the main character in Fear of a Blank Planet. Material possessions mean nothing to him and they bore him, ‘So I got all these things, but so what?’ As he says, ‘You can’t take them with you’, and instead he seeks meaning through religion, asking the song’s mystery addressee, ‘You think you can save my soul?’ The answer – given in verse 2 – seems to be that he could die as a result of a suicide bombing, although the link between verses one and two is oblique. He boards a plane, in which somebody has concealed a bomb in a briefcase, as a result of which, ‘My body will spread through the heavens, across the sky/And my ashes will fall through the cloudburst.’ It’s a surprising and poetic image, despite its bleak suggestion that the answer is oblivion. Instrumentally, the track is very strong. Of particular note is the rhythmic illusion: beginning at about five minutes in, becoming much clearer at around six minutes, when the drums appear to move at half the speed of the other instruments, before the whole track slows down to an epic feeling of finality.

On Track: Porcupine Tree…every album, every song, published by Sonicbond, is out at the end of September and is available to order now at Burning Shed and other good bookshops.

Sources:

Sleeve notes to Stars Die: The Delerium Years 1991-1997 (2002)

Interviews with Steven Wilson and Gavin Harrison filmed for the In Absentia Deluxe Edition of 2020 by Lasse Hoile

Posted on

Remixed Review – Steven Wilson B Sides and Bonus Tracks

Additional content on up-to-date media

****

The recent release of a new song by Steven Wilson, Anyone But Me is an opportunity to review some of the recent bonus material and B-sides associated with his top 5 album THE FUTURE BITES™

Update – June 2021 – the Scottish rock-band have remixed Personal Shopper, turning it into a rock anthem.

The B-Sides Collection

1 Eyewitness

Steven Wilson has often spoken about growing up in a household in which his father listened to Pink Floyd and his mother listened to the disco music of Donna Summer, and this track begins with an instrumental homage to the latter’s 1977 song ‘I Feel Love’. Both tracks open with a burst of noise, followed by sequenced synthesisers on the same note (c). But whereas Donna Summer’s disco epic runs at a fairly stately 120 bpm, Steven Wilson’s propulsive song powers along at around 150 bpm. There is an obvious debt to the classic disco of Giorgio Moroder, but Steven Wilson adds an urgent modern take to 1980s style synth-pop. As usual, the production is very imaginative – listen to the middle eight (repeated) at around 3.30 into the track, when the driving instruments drop out and there is a sudden moment of tenderness in the vocals. 

The theme of the track is one that Steven explored in detail with Porcupine Tree on their 2007 classic Fear of a Blank Planet, the failure of many people to engage with life, preferring to remain drugged up and passive, ‘Now take your meds and stay in bed/It’s all gonna happen to you anyway.’

2 In Floral Green

The first cover that Steven Wilson has released since his 2014 album Cover Version, this song was written by John Mitchell (leader of prog/pop band It Bites since 2006) and released in 2017 as part of his solo project Lonely Robot. John told Prog magazine that the song was about the loss of social connection in the modern world, and that, ‘we as a species probably need to be around a lot less drab grey and a lot more rustic green’.

Unusually, Steven Wilson approached John Mitchell for permission to use the original backing tracks for the song rather than creating his own, which is why the two versions sound very similar. Steven told Rob Skarin that, ‘it felt like my song’.

Both versions use spoken word extracts from the speeches of the British writer, Alan Watts, whose writings helped introduce Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism to a wider Western audience. John Mitchell told Grant Moon of Prog magazine that Watts was, ‘a great advocate of this idea of, ‘the solipsistic haze’ – that are we all a part of somebody else’s imagining, that life is a great conspiracy, a grand design, a dream.’

3 Move Like a Fever

A fiercely electronic track, uncompromising in its presentation and message, this song follows the theme of the effects of social media and empty fame on modern life that is so important on the FUTURE BITES album. The vocals are almost brutal in their delivery on lines such as, ‘The American idol/Is dead on arrival.’ Some fans have baulked at this new directness in Steven Wilson’s work, far from the loving, meticulous recreation of 1970s prog on The Raven That Refused to Sing (2013), but it is undeniably effective. As always, he moves forward in a way that is truly progressive, not worrying about alienating some of his fans whilst satisfying others and finding new ones. As he told Electronic Sound magazine, ‘I recognise that I’ve repeatedly shot myself in the foot by doing the thing that was least expected.’

4 King Ghost – Tangerine Dream Mix

A radical remix of the track from THE FUTURE BITES, over twice as long as the original, expertly done by Thorsten Quaeschning and Paul Frick, both of whom are in the current incarnation of Tangerine Dream. Although they were only a few years old during the 1970s, the period that many consider the most productive and innovative of the band, they manage to recreate a superbly authentic version of Tangerine Dream from that era. The relevant section begins around three minutes into the track, until around 7.30 when it wittily grinds to a brief halt. The Tangerine Dream section is bookended by a few minutes that take material from the original track, taking Steven Wilson’s haunting, stratospheric falsetto vocals as a theme, but never allowing the vocals to break through fully, creating a magical new track.   

Single – Anyone But Me

This gorgeous song was a very last-minute casualty of COVID-19. It was due to be released as the final track of THE FUTURE BITES. The album had even been mastered and cut, but as Steven Wilson says on his YouTube channel the delay in the album’s release caused by the pandemic gave him a chance to re-evaluate. The record was eventually released several months later but the song had been replaced with the, ‘more laid back and atmospheric’ Count Of Unease.

A demo of the song was released as part of the Limited Edition Deluxe Box Set of the album on ‘obsolete media’ (cassette; although sales of cassettes have increased recently). The song features Fyfe Dangerfield from Guillemots on lovely ELO-style backing vocals.

Single – Personal Shopper (Nile Rodgers remix)

On his YouTube channel Steven Wilson says he grew up listening to disco, including the music of Chic, featuring Nile Rodgers so, ‘it’s an absolute thrill to have Nile stamp his legendary signature sound on the track.’ This version of the song combines the European electronic pop of Giorgio Moroder with Nile Rodgers’ funky guitar, emphasising the disco elements and placing less emphasis on the pensive melancholy of the original from the FUTURE BITES album (review here).

Single – Personal Shopper Biffy Clyro Remix 

Biffy Clyro’s remix of this largely electronic song opens with a ethereal vocals and a mesmerizing drone, with a new percussion track and heavy guitars that transports the song to an unexpected world. The almost clinical disco of the original track is replaced with driving, dirty distortion. The melancholy, anti-consumerism message of the original song now becomes urgent.

Towards the end of the song, where the Elton John voice-over appears, a fierce, almost metal-like riff kicks in, sounding like some of the heavier Porcupine Tree riffs. As Steven Wilson says on his YouTube channel, ‘Perhaps one for those that missed hearing the guitars in my recent music!’ It allows shows that a great song is open to multiple interpretations; both the original and the cover version are superb.

Bonus Review – Key of Skeleton

It seems appropriate that a review of bonus tracks should include a bonus review. This is a demo track that recently appeared on streaming services as part of the Super Deluxe edition of Steven Wilson’s 2015 album Hand.Cannot.Erase. This instrumental track begins with keyboards and strings similar to those at the start of I Am The Walrus from the Beatles’ 1967 double EP Magical Mystery Tour. Muscular drums soon join in, with a pleasantly 1960s feel to the guitar. The song has that feeling of inevitability that some of the best instrumental tracks have, until it is nicely subverted towards the end when it takes a dark turn. A hidden gem in Steven Wilson’s extensive discography.

Sources:

Steven Wilson’s YouTube channel

Martin Kielty, Lonely Robot release In Floral Green video, Prog Magazine

Rob Skarin, THE FUTURE BITES: A Conversation With Steven Wilson, YouTube

Alan Watts, The Power of Space Part 4

Grant Moon, Lonely Robot: Space-themed exploration and sonic sounds, Prog Magazine

Mark Roland, An Article about Steven Wilson, Electronic Sound Magazine, Issue 73

Posted on

Remixed Review – Steven Wilson B Sides and Bonus Tracks

Additional content on up-to-date media

****

The recent release of a new song by Steven Wilson, Anyone But Me is an opportunity to review some of the recent bonus material and B-sides associated with his top 5 album THE FUTURE BITES™

Update – June 2021 – the Scottish rock-band have remixed Personal Shopper, turning it into a rock anthem.

The B-Sides Collection

1 Eyewitness

Steven Wilson has often spoken about growing up in a household in which his father listened to Pink Floyd and his mother listened to the disco music of Donna Summer, and this track begins with an instrumental homage to the latter’s 1977 song ‘I Feel Love’. Both tracks open with a burst of noise, followed by sequenced synthesisers on the same note (c). But whereas Donna Summer’s disco epic runs at a fairly stately 120 bpm, Steven Wilson’s propulsive song powers along at around 150 bpm. There is an obvious debt to the classic disco of Giorgio Moroder, but Steven Wilson adds an urgent modern take to 1980s style synth-pop. As usual, the production is very imaginative – listen to the middle eight (repeated) at around 3.30 into the track, when the driving instruments drop out and there is a sudden moment of tenderness in the vocals. 

The theme of the track is one that Steven explored in detail with Porcupine Tree on their 2007 classic Fear of a Blank Planet, the failure of many people to engage with life, preferring to remain drugged up and passive, ‘Now take your meds and stay in bed/It’s all gonna happen to you anyway.’

2 In Floral Green

The first cover that Steven Wilson has released since his 2014 album Cover Version, this song was written by John Mitchell (leader of prog/pop band It Bites since 2006) and released in 2017 as part of his solo project Lonely Robot. John told Prog magazine that the song was about the loss of social connection in the modern world, and that, ‘we as a species probably need to be around a lot less drab grey and a lot more rustic green’.

Unusually, Steven Wilson approached John Mitchell for permission to use the original backing tracks for the song rather than creating his own, which is why the two versions sound very similar. Steven told Rob Skarin that, ‘it felt like my song’.

Both versions use spoken word extracts from the speeches of the British writer, Alan Watts, whose writings helped introduce Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism to a wider Western audience. John Mitchell told Grant Moon of Prog magazine that Watts was, ‘a great advocate of this idea of, ‘the solipsistic haze’ – that are we all a part of somebody else’s imagining, that life is a great conspiracy, a grand design, a dream.’

3 Move Like a Fever

A fiercely electronic track, uncompromising in its presentation and message, this song follows the theme of the effects of social media and empty fame on modern life that is so important on the FUTURE BITES album. The vocals are almost brutal in their delivery on lines such as, ‘The American idol/Is dead on arrival.’ Some fans have baulked at this new directness in Steven Wilson’s work, far from the loving, meticulous recreation of 1970s prog on The Raven That Refused to Sing (2013), but it is undeniably effective. As always, he moves forward in a way that is truly progressive, not worrying about alienating some of his fans whilst satisfying others and finding new ones. As he told Electronic Sound magazine, ‘I recognise that I’ve repeatedly shot myself in the foot by doing the thing that was least expected.’

4 King Ghost – Tangerine Dream Mix

A radical remix of the track from THE FUTURE BITES, over twice as long as the original, expertly done by Thorsten Quaeschning and Paul Frick, both of whom are in the current incarnation of Tangerine Dream. Although they were only a few years old during the 1970s, the period that many consider the most productive and innovative of the band, they manage to recreate a superbly authentic version of Tangerine Dream from that era. The relevant section begins around three minutes into the track, until around 7.30 when it wittily grinds to a brief halt. The Tangerine Dream section is bookended by a few minutes that take material from the original track, taking Steven Wilson’s haunting, stratospheric falsetto vocals as a theme, but never allowing the vocals to break through fully, creating a magical new track.   

Single – Anyone But Me

This gorgeous song was a very last-minute casualty of COVID-19. It was due to be released as the final track of THE FUTURE BITES. The album had even been mastered and cut, but as Steven Wilson says on his YouTube channel the delay in the album’s release caused by the pandemic gave him a chance to re-evaluate. The record was eventually released several months later but the song had been replaced with the, ‘more laid back and atmospheric’ Count Of Unease.

A demo of the song was released as part of the Limited Edition Deluxe Box Set of the album on ‘obsolete media’ (cassette; although sales of cassettes have increased recently). The song features Fyfe Dangerfield from Guillemots on lovely ELO-style backing vocals.

Single – Personal Shopper (Nile Rodgers remix)

On his YouTube channel Steven Wilson says he grew up listening to disco, including the music of Chic, featuring Nile Rodgers so, ‘it’s an absolute thrill to have Nile stamp his legendary signature sound on the track.’ This version of the song combines the European electronic pop of Giorgio Moroder with Nile Rodgers’ funky guitar, emphasising the disco elements and placing less emphasis on the pensive melancholy of the original from the FUTURE BITES album (review here).

Single – Personal Shopper Biffy Clyro Remix 

Biffy Clyro’s remix of this largely electronic song opens with a ethereal vocals and a mesmerizing drone, with a new percussion track and heavy guitars that transports the song to an unexpected world. The almost clinical disco of the original track is replaced with driving, dirty distortion. The melancholy, anti-consumerism message of the original song now becomes urgent.

Towards the end of the song, where the Elton John voice-over appears, a fierce, almost metal-like riff kicks in, sounding like some of the heavier Porcupine Tree riffs. As Steven Wilson says on his YouTube channel, ‘Perhaps one for those that missed hearing the guitars in my recent music!’ It allows shows that a great song is open to multiple interpretations; both the original and the cover version are superb.

Bonus Review – Key of Skeleton

It seems appropriate that a review of bonus tracks should include a bonus review. This is a demo track that recently appeared on streaming services as part of the Super Deluxe edition of Steven Wilson’s 2015 album Hand.Cannot.Erase. This instrumental track begins with keyboards and strings similar to those at the start of I Am The Walrus from the Beatles’ 1967 double EP Magical Mystery Tour. Muscular drums soon join in, with a pleasantly 1960s feel to the guitar. The song has that feeling of inevitability that some of the best instrumental tracks have, until it is nicely subverted towards the end when it takes a dark turn. A hidden gem in Steven Wilson’s extensive discography.

Sources:

Steven Wilson’s YouTube channel

Martin Kielty, Lonely Robot release In Floral Green video, Prog Magazine

Rob Skarin, THE FUTURE BITES: A Conversation With Steven Wilson, YouTube

Alan Watts, The Power of Space Part 4

Grant Moon, Lonely Robot: Space-themed exploration and sonic sounds, Prog Magazine

Mark Roland, An Article about Steven Wilson, Electronic Sound Magazine, Issue 73

Posted on

Steven Wilson and the Art of the Home Studio

No Man’s Land

When No Man’s Land Studio finally gets the Blue Plaque it deserves in recognition of the artistic endeavour that took place there, the people who arrive to mount it on the wall it won’t find a palace like Paisley Park. They will find a suburban bungalow in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England. Unlike Prince, who was able to record in any room in his Paisley Park complex, Steven Wilson had one room in which to record – his childhood bedroom.

The original No Man’s Land studio (Sound on Sound magazine 2010)

It was in No Man’s Land Studio/Steven’s bedroom that the first two Porcupine Tree albums, On the Sunday of Life and Up the Downstair were recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But as the decades progressed and the band began to record in better and better studios – Foel Studio in Wales, Avatar Studios in New York, and AIR Studios in Lyndhurst Hall, London – Steven still returned to his childhood home to record and mix Porcupine Tree’s albums. It was not until the summer of 2009 that he moved his studio into his own house, and even then, it was an in an ordinary room. Steven told Sound on Sound magazine in 2010 that, ‘People always ask if they can see or photograph my studio and I say, ‘you might be disappointed.’

The professional studio

What is remarkable about No Man’s Land is that Steven continued to work in his bedroom studio despite its obvious limitations. Technology now allows very high-quality recordings to be made in bedrooms using laptops and highly sophisticated software, mixing ‘inside the box’ as the sound engineers say.There was a time, before mixing desks became automated (able to replicate the engineer’s skilled finger on the fader with ghostly precision) when a small orchestra of musicians used to line up along the length of the mixing board to do the final mix, which was a performance in itself. But in the late 1980s when Steven started writing and recording music the technology was primitive and most aspiring musicians craved a record deal, partly because it meant that they had access to a decent recording studio.

Eventually, by the time of Porcupine Tree’s seventh studio album In Absentia, Steven did get a deal with a major American record label and did have access to a major American studio (Avatar in New York) but didn’t achieve the sales that he and the record company expected (and frankly deserved).

But the fact that Steven continued to use a bedroom studio so much, even when Porcupine Tree became increasingly successful, says a great deal about him as a musician and producer.

The autodidact

Steven Wilson is an autodidact and he was lucky enough to have a father who was an electronics engineer who when Steven was an early teenager helped the young adventurer by building him eccentric electronic delights; a sequencer that divided the notes into units of three when most rock songs have four beats in each bar, maybe instilling in the young Steven an unconscious love of the unusual time signatures that kept the world of Prog Rock turning for the last 50 or 60 years; a four-track recorder on which the erase head didn’t work so everything had to be recorded in one take . He told Sound on Sound that he would play his father a record and say, ‘Dad, how do you make that sound? And he’d go off and figure it out.’ Steven’s dad was also a musical influence on his son, as was his mother. He recalls hearing his father listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and his mother to Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, two albums that had a huge musical impact on him at the age of eight.

Re-Mixing

What is remarkable about Steven is that he has built up a reputation as a producer and re-mixer of some of the greatest prog rock bands ever while still working in his studio at home. It probably didn’t do any harm that his surround sound mix of 2007’s classic Porcupine Tree album Fear of a Blank Planet was nominated for a Grammy. The list of artists he has remixed in stereo and/or surround sound is impressive, including Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Marillion, Roxy Music, Rush, Simple Minds, Tangerine Dream, Tears for Fears, XTC and Yes. He told Sound on Sound that his work on these classic records was ‘The equivalent of polishing the Sistine Chapel’; to continue his metaphor no paint fell off the ceiling, and the colours were brighter, the lines clearer but still true to Michelangelo’s original vision. His remixes are respectful, revealing the beauty of what is already there rather than imposing his own personality.

No-man’s Land studio (Sound on Sound magazine 2010)

Storm Corrosion

Steven Wilson has had a long association with Mikael Åkerfeldt from the Swedish heavy metal band Opeth, producing several of the band’s albums starting with Blackwater Park in 2001. The partnership between Steven and Mikael bore musical fruit in 2012 with their Storm Corrosion collaboration and the album of the same name, recorded at No Man’s Land. The album includes the remarkable song ‘Drag Ropes’, a disturbingly, bewitchingly, discordantly melodic epic with some of the most gorgeous vocals ever recorded by either of them. Its terrible beauty is matched by the official video made by Jess Cope, who also created some of best videos for Steven’s solo work for songs such as ‘Routine’ (from Hand.Cannot.Erase) and ‘Drive Home’ and ‘The Raven That Refused to Sing’ (from the album of the same name). 

The video for Drag Ropes, directed by Directed by Jess Cope

Steven’s 5.1 mix of the Storm Corrosion album was nominated for Best Surround Sound Album in the 55th Grammy Awards. So how has he achieved all this often without going into a professional studio? He has admitted that he often found it confusing to go into a professional studio with a proper mixing desk and speakers. He got worse results in the studio rather than recording and mixing at home because as he told Sound on Sound he had, ‘no idea what I was hearing’. Getting to know how his room sounds is the most important thing, even though it doesn’t have state of the art acoustic treatment and an analogue mixing desk with 384 faders (in 2005 the Harrison installed a console with 384 inputs which was over 30 feet long into Universal’s Dub Room 4 a.k.a. Alfred Hitchcock Theater, but it looks more like a stadium than a home studio). Having a consistent internal audio reference point is more important to him than using an expensive studio, because although it will sound impressive it will also sound confusingly different from what his ears are used to.

Loudness Wars

Steven has often mastered his own mixes, and one reason he has avoided sending them to a mastering engineer is that audio compression is often applied by the engineer. This evens out the differences between quiet passages and loud passages so that the song sounds consistently, excitingly loud throughout. A member of Deep Purple can be heard saying to the sound engineer on the iconic Made in Japan live album, ‘Can I have everything louder than everything else?’ And this witty comment sums up the problem; if everything is louder, then nothing is louder. The so-called Loudness Wars began; ears bled, brains fried and for some listeners the music was ruined. Metallica’s fans complained that the 2008 album Death Magnetic sounded compressed and lifeless. In response to the criticism, the band’s drummer Lars Ulrich said the album was designed to sound loud in your car; he had listened to it in his car and in his view, it sounded ‘smokin’.

Compression can make songs cut through on the radio, but the point about many of Porcupine Tree’s songs is that they are often long-form stories, with dynamic contrast between loud and soft parts throughout, more like a piece of classical music than a radio-friendly pop song. Perhaps a better comparison is a song like ‘Echoes’ from Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle, which at over 23 minutes fills the whole of side two on vinyl. This starts with the gentle sound of Richard Wright’s amplified piano passing through a Hammond Organ speaker, leading to beautifully delicate vocal harmonies, a monumentally funky section with a raging distorted guitar, an abstract stormy section with anguished seagull cries, finally returning to the opening piano motif, via an explosion of sunlit hope, then a nostalgic return to the beautiful vocal harmonies, rising finally into the stratosphere with a repeating theme that rises forever and ever. The longer songs of Porcupine Tree share some of Pink Floyd’s epic length and ambitious journeys.

Home demos

Steven’s early albums under the Porcupine Tree name were largely solo efforts, but even when Porcupine Tree became a proper band a lot of the material began as very detailed demos recorded in his home studio. He created the drums, bass and synthesizer parts using computer software, then added piano, guitars and vocals over the top. When the band could eventually afford to go into world-class recording studios, he would then ask them to replace the parts he had programmed into his computer with real drums, bass and synthesizers. It’s a very unusual band dynamic, and what is more remarkable in some ways is the fact that despite the amount of control he had over the whole process Steven had the musical intelligence to allow the other superb musicians in the band  to bring their own personalities to the recordings – all of them are distinctively themselves but also fit perfectly into the band’s overall dynamic. 

While preparing the demos in his home studio, Steven took the very prescient step of recording everything in the highest possible quality, particularly the vocals. He kept most of the vocals from the demo versions because at the time he wrote the song he felt closest to it emotionally. The poet William Wordsworth took a very different approach, ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ Steven didn’t need to recall the raw emotion he felt in the white heat of creativity; he had already recorded it on tape. By doing so, he was able to solve the problem that many bands have, of trying to capture the raw emotion of the initial demo that somehow slips through the fingers like an eel. A possible way round that is to do what 1980s band T-coy did with their song Cariño. Lacking a master tape of the song, they simply pressed copies straight from the original demo they had recorded on cassette.

The new studio

Steven Wilson’s new home studio

Steven Wilson recently moved house and has had a lovely new home studio built. The studio can be seen in several home recordings he made during lockdown of classic Porcupine Tree songs on the Future Bites sessions, released on YouTube. He now has the facility to mix in Dolby Atmos surround sound, which is more sophisticated than the 5.1 sound system he had in his previous home studio. His most recent album The Future Bites is available in a Dolby Atmos mix, and he has just completed a tenth-anniversary surround sound mix of the Storm Corrosion album in both 5.1 and Atmos. He has also brought hope to fans of the project by telling Jerry Ewing of Prog magazine that he may make another album with Mikael Åkerfeldt, but only if they can work together in his home studio again.

References:

Tom Flint, Steven Wilson: Recording & Marketing Porcupine Tree (Sound on Sound magazine, June 2010); Jerry Ewing, Steven Wilson discusses possible Storm Corrosion II (Prog magazine)

Posted on

Album Review – Isolated Dreams by Ghost Echo

A bold and accomplished debut from the Dutch duo

****

Many lockdown albums will be released in the next few months. Some of the recent highlights include Richard Barbieri’s Under a Spell , and Steven Wilson’s The Future Bites, recorded before lockdown but released in January. Now Dutch musicians Remy de Wal and Karel Witte have recorded Isolated Dreams, their first album together as Ghost Echo, with almost all the music being made by the two musicians remotely. The album was written and recorded between March last year and February this year in their home studios. Remy and Karel exchanged demos and did all the mixing and production themselves, an impressive achievement.

The album opens with Black Era with Eighties-sounding drum machines and synths, an anthemic chorus and vocals that are slightly reminiscent of the pure tones Morten Harket of the Norwegian pop group A-ha (although without reaching his stratospheric heights). But this is not a straightforward pop song; although it starts in that style, it soon embraces an almost prog metal style with metallic guitars and screeching synth lines. It is a promising and mature start to the album, immediately demanding the listener’s attention.

Dust begins with a gorgeous keyboard motif, influenced as the band admit partly by the soundtracks to both of the Blade Runner films. The song features lo-fi trip hop beats and a lovely, introspective vocal line delivered with great emotion.

Late Night is the highlight of the album, an atmospherically dystopian tale of a man haunted by demons in the small hours of the night. The band openly acknowledge the song’s debt to the more recent electronic work of Steven Wilson, but the gorgeous harmonies in the chorus also hark back to Wilson’s earlier work with his band Porcupine Tree. The disturbing animated video, with a touch of psychedelia, was created by Tiago Araújo; it also has an indirect link to Steven Wilson in that it is similar to the work of Jess Cope in her animation for The People Who Eat Darkness from Wilson’s solo album To The Bone.

Tiago Araújo’s video is based on a script by Karel Witte

Null Void begins with a dark trip-hop soundscape and heavily compressed vocals, like the soundtrack to a bleak science fiction film, perhaps set in the dystopian near future when the planet has been devasted by some cataclysmic event and an oppressive regime has come to power. The song ends with a prog rock style epic guitar solo, and the repeated words ‘I see you watching me’, suggesting the protagonist is now living in a totalitarian state, before the track stutters to a halt.

Another stand-out track is Pitfalls which closes the album, beginning with a slow-burning ambient sound, building to another epic guitar solo, accompanied by Giorgio Moroder-style synth chords and prog metal guitar chords, with emotionally wrought vocals; a powerful climax to the album.

It is to the band’s credit that even at this early stage in their career they have sequenced an album of emotional highs and lows, and taken the listener on a journey of discovery. They even left off the song Conspiracy Leader described by the band as ‘a dark synthpop-goes-progmetal track featuring acoustic drums (!) by Kay Ketting’,  as they did not feel that it fitted into the sequencing of the album, a brave but important artistic decision so early on.

It would be hard to tell that the album was recorded in lockdown except for the reference in the title to ‘isolated’ dreams. It is an accomplished and bold debut, immediately establishing an exciting new voice, a very effective combination of pop, prog, metal and trip-hop. Apparently, they are already writing new material which provides hope for the band’s future when they can get together in person.

Ghost Echo are:

Remy de Wal – Guitars, synthesizers, programming and backing vocals

Karel Witte – Lead vocals, guitars, synthesizers and programming

Isolated Dreams is out now.