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!
This is a bit of a rarity for me here: Japan is not really a band I’ve listened to at all; in fact, watching this video may have been the first time I had ever heard one of their songs in its entirety. However, I am well aware of the band for two significant reasons: singer David Sylvian collaborated with Robert Fripp on 1993’s excellent The First Day, which I’ve highlighted here before, and keyboardist Richard Barbieri has for over a decade been a member of what is probably my favorite band, Porcupine Tree. It’s cool to see Sylvian doing his best to look like a member of Duran Duran (though of course, in fact it is the other way around), and it’s amazing to see Richard Barbieri so young.
This eerie, experimental track is from Tin Drum, which my research suggests is Japan’s most highly regarded album. It seems to be something of an acquired taste, and it’s not the kind of music I would typically listen to while working, driving, or really doing anything besides devoting my full attention to the music itself. But it is definitely intriguing, and makes me want to hear more.
I’ve missed the past couple of days here, and I’ll probably miss some more this week, as I’m going on vacation for the next few days. I wanted to find a song with “vacation” or “trip” in the title. No dice, at least not in my library (except the Camper Van Beethoven track “Payed Vacation: Greece”).
This is not exactly the kind of “trip” I’ll be going on, but to some extent, Voyage 34 fits the bill. This album is a bit of an oddity in the oddity-filled Porcupine Tree catalog: originally recorded solo in 1992-1993 by Steven Wilson, before PT was even really a band, these recordings were collected and given a proper mastering for CD release in 2000, and the suite, in whole or in part, is occasionally performed live as well.
This live version from 1999 shows us the band in a fairly early form — Chris Maitland had not yet been replaced on drums by Gavin Harrison, and the visuals are not there like today (in fact compared to what I’m used to seeing this almost looks like a soundcheck, but there’s an audience), but they’re still cool to hear live. I believe this performance was at the same prog rock festival in San Francisco that brought Magma to these shores, and it occurred just a couple of days before I saw Magma live in Chicago, as previously mentioned.
I still think that narrator sounds like Dick Clark.
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.
