Wow. I really don’t know what happened to me on this one. I am usually all over the latest news about Porcupine Tree. I’ve been anticipating this album for most of the year, and yet somehow I completely brain-farted on its Sept. 11 release date. Granted, a lot has been going on to distract me from it but still… I’ve been following new releases. I suspect the album has — most unfortunately — not been given adequate promotion.
The only reason I remembered it tonight, even, was that there is finally some promotion, in the form of this video as a free iTunes download. I got it, and I enjoyed it. Porcupine Tree rarely disappoints me, and Lasse Hoile’s visuals are, as usual, a perfect complement to the music. Well done boys! Now I need to go out tomorrow and track down the album on CD because this is one I am not going to settle for as an MP3 download!
For evidence that prog rock is, in fact, not dead, I would direct you first to the outstanding Porcupine Tree. I first got into these guys in 1999 after Stupid Dream was released, but they really became the reigning kings of the 21st century prog world when Gavin Harrison (I’ll go out on a limb here and say he’s better than Neil Peart) joined the band on 2002’s In Absentia.
I got to see them on that tour, at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia. Phenomenal show. And that was before they started going all-out with the Lasse Holle video projections. This clip is just the projections, from the song “Halo,” as performed by the band in Chicago in October 2005. But you get to hear the amazing power of the band (and Stephen Wilson’s skills not only as a musician but as a recording engineer — Rush should really get him to remix Vapor Trails), and I cannot recommend strongly enough that any fan of progressive rock immediately seek out the live DVD set from those Chicago performances, Arriving Somewhere.
