Porcupine Tree - The Incident (2009)

I must admit I was slightly excited when I heard Porcupine Tree was going to be making a double album, because, ya know, these guys have made some good music. In the past. The 90’s, umm the early 90’s. Well it’s been awhile since Porcupine Tree has made a bonafide awesome album. Don’t get me wrong ‘In Absentia’ and even ‘Deadwing’ had some good stuff on them, but as a whole they utterly pale in comparison to the glorious progressive/space rock performed on colossal releases like ‘Voyage 34,’ ‘Up the Downstair’ or ‘The Sky Moves Sideways.’

Apparently this is a concept album; about what I do not know and frankly I’m not about to sit down with this album again and read the lyrics after I write this review. The big problem with this album is that the riffs are just tedious and simple, the solos (the few there are) hardly grab my interest, the progressive rock influences are scant, and the little ambient moments are not interesting either. The hip hop beats in ‘The Incident’ are not cool either neither is the fact that there are two songs that sound exactly alike (tracks 1 & 10). The fact that nothing is really catchy doesn’t help them any either. All things considered PT in 2009 sounds like an alternative rock band with some small progressive and ambient influences to their work. Meh, I say.

The only really positive thing I can say about this release is that as usual Steven Wilson’s singing is quite good and there are some interesting parts in tracks 5, 9 and 14. Of course that won’t save the record at all. Basically when you struggle to get through even the shortest tracks on the album you know something is wrong. It’s kind of like when George Lucas made the Phantom Menace. He should have known from the start that it was a stupid goddamn bad idea, but no he went and did it anyway and tarnished the greatest sci-fi epic ever. PT has been on a descending spiral of failure for a while now, but man never did I expect them to make an album completely devoid of even one thoroughly decent song.

If you manage to make it through the first disc (yeah there are two of them…) and all fifty five minutes of it then you’ll have an additional twenty minutes of music to deal with, which truthfully isn’t much better, though like the first there are a few smidgens of appealing material. It also beckons the question as to why the entire thing was not just on one disc. Yeah I know that’s over seventy five minutes and compact discs only hold seventy five, but seriously remove track 10 for fuck’s sake. Ugh!

I’m not exactly sure what happened during this incident but I can tell you one thing had I witnessed it I just would of turned my head and kept walking. You should too.