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opinions on music - porcupine tree

This band has made quite a few albums, and i usually like a select few of their tracks from each, so i’m smushing them together here. I like them for their — i believe — fairly unique blend of lyrics that talk about highly emotional and dark themes like depression, rape, and suicide, with empathy, combined with backing music that doesn’t exploit the topics for extraneous drama either.

Porcupine Tree has made quite a few songs about things they don’t like, and i’ll all heartily recommend them and their melodic soundscapes of disdain: Every Home Is Wired (Signify, 1996) takes on the internet and the effects its repetitiveness has on its users, The Sound of Muzak (In Absentia, 2002) is substantially less oblique attack on the music industry, and Halo (Deadwing, 2005) does the same to organized religion.

Signify (1996)

Signify (1996) is kind of rough around the edges¹, but has a few excellent spots in Sever, “Light Mass Prayers” (instrumental), or Intermediate Jesus. Their last published album The Incident (2009) is too frayed and disorganized for my taste.

Deadwing (2005)

Deadwing is supposed to be some sort of surreal ghost story, as Wikipedia tells us. Other than the first track i don’t think it’s particularly spooky or even just tangentially ghost-related though. Maybe they actually meant just the first track, because, surprise, it is also called Deadwing.

That aside, i’d heartily recommend that opening track, for similar reasons like The Twyncyn above. Aside from it, Arriving Somewhere But Not Here definitely is this album’s second “main” track, and its twelve minutes are the most beautiful rendition of someone being murdered that i’ve had the pleasure of hearing. It’s so good that i’ll actually give you a link to listen right now: Arriving Somewhere But Not Here on YouTube.