I heard Steven Wilson’s solo stuff
before I ever picked up an album
from Porcupine Tree. A shape-shifting
prog rocker, Wilson is a the singer
songwriter guitar player behind this
band and its massive catalog of 34
years, a solo artist with a formidable
catalog of 26 years, and has become
a kind of wizard studio engineer who,
in his spare time,
has remixed classic albums by the likes
of King Crimson, Yes, Gentle Giant, Tears
for Fears, and my favorite band in the
history of favorite bands, XTC. Steven
Wilson is a very busy bee. And from
one album to the next, especially in
his solo catalog, he’s very hard to
predict, as he easily slides between
genre, from prog to pop to folk to
classical–sometimes within the same
song. But as I’m listening to In Absentia,
a Porcupine Tree album from 2002, the
band is very much doing that same kind
of thing. They open with super heavy
guitar driven prog rock, but within
minutes they introduce beautiful melodies
and lovely singing. The album continues
with that kind of wild variety, between
the heavy and the acoustic, between
the head-spinning complexities of odd
time signatures, and the sublimely
straight forward. But Wilson has a real
skill for crafting lovely vocal parts,
so in almost every case, even in the
most complex tunes, I can sing along
with the choruses after a single listen.
But there are tunes here that are
decidedly noisy, more arty, manic
and scary, right along side that horrific
album art. And this thing is long; it
clocks in at almost 70 minutes over two
discs. The musicianship is turbo-charged
and there’s never a single dull moment.
In Absentia is a terrific album and I
don’t know why I didn’t listen to it
more often after I picked it up–only
within the last few years or so, late
to the party, as they say. It seems to
be a recurring theme as I move through
this project of listening to everything,
as I keep coming across albums that are
undeniably good, maybe even great, for
which I am woefully unfamiliar. I guess
that’s a feature, not a bug, and a good
problem to have, I suppose, having
more great music than I thought I had,
rediscovering gems that were inexplicably
lost in the stacks. It might be,
one would think, a good reason to slow
down my music acquisition habits, to
instead become more familiar with and
appreciate what’s already in the
collection. You’d be right if you
guessed that I have not done that,
however.
Steven Wilson, of course, has
surrounded himself with stellar players,
the two core ones, I believe, have
been with him since Porcupine Tree’s
inception. Gavin Harrison on drums,
and, of particular interest to me,
Richard Barbieri on keyboards–
kind of the elder statesmen of the band,
I suppose, as Richard made his debut
into the synthesizer and rock
pantheon as one the founding
members of another one of my
absolute touchstones from the
80’s, the New Romantic new wave
band from England called Japan.
Listening to the last Porcupine Tree
album I have, their most recent,
Closure/Continuation from 2022, is
a similar experience to the one with
In Absentia, only better, for reasons
I would have a hard time describing.
Everything that makes that earlier
album great is great about this one
as well. Maybe the riffs are deeper,
maybe the sonics are more sophisticated,
maybe the melodies are stronger,
and the lyrics, while I’m not paying
super close attention to them, might
be loftier, more literary–I don’t
know–I’m just spitballing. I’ll just
admit that maybe I like this album
better because I listened to it more
often and therefore know it better.
I would say, though, that the songs
on this album, and the production,
provide a continuity that maybe the
other record lacks. It feels like a
classic record–like I’m listening
to a great Pink Floyd album, only
heavier in places. Check out “Dignity”
for a Floyd flashback of sorts.
All in all, great recordings, great
songs from a great band, a band for
which a deeper dive might be necessary
in my near future.
Notes on the vinyl editions:
- In Absentia, Transmission 23.2 Records, Stephen Wilson 2017 remaster of the 2002 recording, black double vinyl.
- Closure/Continuation, Sony Records, 2022, opaque white double vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
