I was just perusing my iTunes library and I discovered something astonishing: I have more tracks by Porcupine Tree (173) than by Rush (172). And I have every Rush studio album (plus the new single) in my library. The time on my Porcupine Tree music is more, too… an astonishing three hours more. In total I have over 18 hours of Porcupine Tree music in my iTunes library. Granted, much of it is live, so I have plenty of duplicate tracks, but their live performances are so blistering and so perfect, that in some ways they’re superior to the studio originals.
I decided to honor this rise in prominence of Porcupine Tree by featuring them today on the blog, and what better track than “The Sound of Muzak”? Steven Wilson went through a protracted period where he was bitterly angry at the music industry (gee, I can’t imagine why), and for a while there every Porcupine Tree album had at least one track devoted to criticizing the bland, soulless commodification of music. The tracks are all good (are there any real duds in the Porcupine Tree catalog?), but this one probably says it best, and is worth quoting in its entirety:
The Sound of Muzak
Hear the sound of music
Drifting in the aisles
Elevator prozac
Stretching on for miles
The music of the future
Will not entertain
It’s only meant to repress
And neutralise your brain
Soul gets squeezed out
Edges get blunt
Demographic
Gives what you want
One of the wonders of the world is going down
It’s going down I know
It’s one of the blunders of the world that no one cares
No one cares enough
Now the sound of music
Comes in silver pills
Engineered to suit you
Building cheaper thrills
The music of rebellion
Makes you wanna rage
But it’s made by millionaires
Who are nearly twice your age
Soul gets squeezed out
Edges get blunt
Demographic
Gives what you want
One of the wonders of the world is going down
It’s going down I know
It’s one of the blunders of the world that no one cares
No one cares enough
Eight years ago, when I lived in Atlanta, I turned a coworker friend on to Porcupine Tree. Today on Facebook he shared this video I had not previously seen. Awesome.
Porcupine Tree is one of the few bands whose intense, precise, meticulously-produced playing in the studio is not only matched but surpassed in a live setting. Plenty of bands feed off the energy of a live crowd to create a performance that is more “alive” than their studio albums, but it’s rare that a band’s playing is, if anything, more tight on stage, and mixed as well to boot. I can verify that this isn’t (entirely) post-production cleanup work making the band sound so great here; when I saw them live in 2003 in Athens, GA I was blown away by just how great they sounded, especially in a venue like the 40 Watt Club.
I regret that I haven’t had the opportunity to see the band live again since then, but artifacts like this video and the 2005 live DVD Arriving Somewhere… capture that live energy.
Fear of a Blank Planet was the third in a string of back-to-back masterpieces by the band, beginning with 2002′s In Absentia. And they just keep getting better.
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!
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.
