Porcupine Tree Review: October 22, 2005; House of Blues, Sunset Strip, Hollywood
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, space was a common theme in rock music, particularly in the genres called psychedelic and progressive. Pink Floyd's first album, from 1967, included the ten-minute instrumental "Interstellar Overdrive." Their next album was called Saucer Full of Secrets, and it featured tracks like "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun." Yes had a track called "Starship Trooper" on their third album from 1971, while the Roger Dean cover of their album Fragile started a series of illustrations about interstellar colonization that has continued for more than thirty years. Van der Graaf Generator's H to He Who Am the Only One has the track "Pioneers over C," about interstellar colonization gone very bad. Aliens, space travel, and the future were common themes of Jimi Hendrix too. He died in 1970.
Those were the days. Rock musicians combined elements of jazz, folk, and classical music to produce long pieces of music that were far removed from the three-minute love songs of rock and roll. The lyrics were complicated in the psychedelic era, and the progressive-rock stage shows were often elaborate and mythopoeic, as brutally satirized in the film This is Spinal Tap.
Porcupine Tree started life as another Spinal Trap, a fictitious group invented by Steven Wilson of the group No-Man, a multi-instrumentalist geek who is pretty much a Generation X reincarnation of Mike Oldfield. Wilson and a friend invented a spurious band history, while Wilson recorded pastiche tracks in the same spirit as XTC's Psonic Psunspot spoof of psychedelic music. But one of the Porcupine Tree tracks, "Radioactive Toy," became a playlist favorite of a London DJ, and the demand for Porcupine Tree grew. After several albums in which a real Porcupine Tree group gradually developed by accretion, they released a stunning 1999 album, Stupid Dream. Every bit as accomplished as the best Pink Floyd, but with an intense Generation X bleakness at its core, Stupid Dream sparked a resurgence of hope among fans of difficult rock music. But none of us thought that Porcupine Tree could ever be more than an obscurity to be listened on the expensive hi-fi's of aging boomers.
We were wrong. Steven Wilson has continued to work with a variety of obscure groups, from No-Man, to Bass Communication, to I.E.M and Blackfield. But Porcupine Tree has become a successful club act, with tours that people under 40 attend, even a few twentysomething hotties. Of course they bob their heads only to the simpler chord progressions, but they don't leave when the time signature or key changes too often.
MR saw them at the Fillmore in San Francisco this June and then the House of Blues in Hollywood this October. The first show was the more lyrical, while the second had crunch. But in both cases there was music that could, or perhaps should, have been recorded in 1973, with lyrics to match the best that Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator ever wrote. And Steve Wilson is a marvel on-stage. While he is a consummate musician with mastery of a variety of guitars, acoustic and electric, he is also an intense stage presence. It is like watching Kurt Cobain front Pink Floyd. Yet he is still a geek, with the wire-rimmed glasses and shoulder-length limp hair that so many college students had between 1968 and 1973.
Can we dare hope that there will be a resurgence of demanding music to blow away the simple-minded pap that dominates rock music these days? Green Day snarling or Coldplay whining. The same four or five jangly chords, laboriously played by several guitarists who barely keep time in 4/4. The infernally dull lyrics about trivial relationships agonized over by losers. Forget solos or bridges. We are lucky if we get a transition from tonic to dominant and back again.
Porcupine Tree will never become the Next Big Thing. Steve Wilson will be forty years old soon and even though he is a well-preserved Gen Xer, he isn't likely to become the heart-throb of confused pimply teenagers. Most of the crowd at the two shows that MR saw were older men with their buddies, sometimes their second or third wives in attendance, a few mistresses, perhaps carrying their man's cholesterol medication in their purses. The younger men in the audience seemed to be musicians, carefully watching for guitar riffs to steal for their next dullard composition, in which two bars of Steve Wilson's music will be stretched out for four minutes of bleating futility.
But we can still be swept away by the power of progressive-metal Porcupine Tree tracks like "Halo" or "Blackest Eyes" in concert at the better clubs. Or we can listen to lengthy masterworks like "The Sky Moves Sideways" on CD. There are even short tracks of intense science fantasy like "Space Transmission," very effective even when played as mp3s driving Bose headphones. Steve Wilson can sing with intensity as his guitar does a glissando with feedback, a mellotron sample making a curtain of sound behind him. Those of us who are old enough can remember a time when rock music was visionary instead of a mindless comfort. It is good to hear someone from the next generation who can make the future come alive in sound once again.
