Friday, October 2, 2009

Porcupine Tree "The Incident"





















As I mentioned in the previous post, PT is probably one of my favorite discoveries of this decade. Now that I've given this record the requisite three spins, I'll say what I can for now so you can decide for yourself if you want to try it. This is prog rock for the 21st century. A concept album (wow, there's a lot of those recently... that's a good thing!) that encompasses the entire first CD. I've read comparisons to Rush "Hemispheres", but I get Pink Floyd's "Animals". Either way, that's pretty good  company. "Incident" isn't as tuneful as Rush and by that I mean sing-a-long stuff. This is more meat and muscle where Rush is flash and technique. Don't get me wrong, this is a good album, but now I'm looking forward to sitting down for a listen with the headphones on, uninterrupted. These types of albums are what I've called "20th century classical music", and now 21st century. The band has been playing the entire work in concert and they have a statement read at the beginning asking the crowd for quiet during the softer passages. And apparently, "Incident" is striking a cord with new listeners as I've read where it has debuted on sales charts all over Europe higher than ever before and here in the US at 25. There are four tracks on the second CD which are more typical of recent PT work if you have to get that fix. Prolific as Mr. Wilson is, I'm sure we'll hear something else soon from PT or his side projects.

No comments:

Post a Comment