Review: Porcupine Tree - The Incident

You know the saying “less is more?”  Well, if you’re a progressive-rock musician, odds are you either (a) have never once heard that saying before, or (b) dismissed it as a bullshit excuse reserved for the musically unadventurous and faint-of-heart long ago.  Yep, prog-rock and the people who make it have never exactly been known for their restraint or conservatism - songs lasting, on average, at least six minutes tend to be the genre’s equivalent of the three-minute pop song, and of course, the more solos and odd time signatures, the better.  But the true test of any prog band’s mettle is the extended-length epic: compositions usually clocking in at around thirty minutes or longer and made up of enough separate-but-linked musical themes and motifs to fill any lesser bands’ entire discographies.  Dream Theater are pretty adept at this; prog supergroup Transatlantic have based their entire existence around the concept; and naturally, Rush did it before anyone else did with 2112.  So, it was only a matter of time before Porcupine Tree, flag-bearers for a new breed of prog-rock, threw their hat in the ring and released their own hour-long epic musical journey - The Incident.  But how did it turn out?  Depends on how you like your prog.

The trouble is, Porcupine Tree have never made particularly grandiose music.  It’s not that the music isn’t complex enough, or that it doesn’t carry the emotional weight of the band’s peers’ output - on the contrary, Porcupine Tree’s music tends to be some of the most moving material you’re likely to find in the genre.  However, the mood prevalent in most of the band’s music tends to swing between downcast, shoegazing melancholy and biting, acidic outbursts of vitriol, neither of which lend themselves to the epic-sounding Overtures and Grand Finales that bands along the lines of Dream Theater have trademarked.  Steven Wilson doesn’t have an operatic bone in his body, which makes his songwriting refreshingly free of bombast.  So it really shouldn’t be that surprising that, hot off the heels of recording his first solo album, Insurgentes (you can read my review of that one here), Wilson penned a fifty-five-minute-long suite that covers much of the same emotional territory as his previous releases.  That’s not to say The Incident isn’t musically adventurous; between the 14 tracks the title-suite is split up into (henceforth referred to by their individual track names; only in prog-rock does something as simple as naming songs become this complicated), a lot of stylistic ground is covered.  “The Incident” and “Circle Of Manias,” for instance, are some of the heaviest material the band has recorded to date.  On the other hand, “The Yellow Windows Of The Evening Train” and the suite’s conclusion “I Drive The Hearse” are positively tranquil.  The best material in the piece seems to rest comfortably between these extremes: “The Blind House” is a high-energy rocker that charges along mostly in 5/4, while “Time Flies” is almost an epic-within-an-epic, stretching out for nearly twelve minutes of acoustic verses, a chorus featuring some of Wilson’s best vocals yet, and a suitably indulgent guitar solo.  The problem is pacing: the placement of something as somber as “I Drive The Hearse” at the end of an epic composition such as this is a big part of why the whole piece doesn’t sit as well as it should; it seems that something so ambitious deserves to go out with a bang, not a whimper.  It’s great music when taken at face value, though - Wilson knows how to take a melody or a lyric and twist it, knife-like, right into your heart.  It simply seems anticlimactic as part of the bigger picture.

It’s definitely worth noting that The Incident also includes a second disc of material that wasn’t composed as part of the suite (confined to the CD release’s first disc).  They’re not b-sides, though - the four songs on the second disc are high-quality Porcupine Tree in their own right, especially the atmospheric “Flicker” and the bitter but somehow smirking “Remember Me Lover”.  In a way, the quality of the songs on the second disc further underline the weaknesses of the first.  Porcupine Tree seems much more comfortable writing music that’s self-contained into reasonably-sized capsules.  Even the specific sections of the first disc that stand out seem to work better when viewed as their own individual songs instead of being forced into a larger concept.  Who knows - maybe if the band had focused on developing all the ideas contained in The Incident as their own separate songs instead of pigeon-holing them in as sections of an epic, some of the shorter, almost interlude-like pieces (such as “Great Expectations,” “Kneel And Disconnect,” and “Your Unpleasant Family”) would have been fleshed out further into much more satisfying individual compositions.  Food for thought.  Really, though, Porcupine Tree is an incredibly talented band, and a lot of the music contained in The Incident is some of the best they’ve released.  Their music is just more powerful when delivered on a slightly-smaller scale than the standard prog-rock epic.  Maybe in their case, “less is more” really is advice to be followed.

Rating: 3.5/5

Standout Tracks:
“Time Flies”
“Remember Me Lover”
“The Blind House”
“Flicker”

Release Date: September 14, 2009