This writing is almost exactly a year old. I wrote most of this within the first week or two of getting my copy of Porcupine Tree's The Incident in the mail. I never got around to polishing and publishing it, and so it seemed to become obsolete. But now, just past the anniversary of the debut and a few days from Porcupine Tree's last full performance of The Incident in New York (which I am currently too poor to attend), seemed like as good a time as any.
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If you’ve been following anything about Porcupine Tree’s latest album, I imagine you may have seen a slew of reviews, each one giving a quick overview with vague comments about each song, highlighting favorite moments, or simply saying, “bad ass.” As an artist, I find myself digging in deeper than most critics, bloggers, and forum posters, trying to understand why this is one of my favorite moments or why it’s “bad ass.” So this won’t so much be a review as an explanation or guide to this extraordinary piece of art. Note that this focuses on the first disc, which is the song cycle, The Incident. If you haven’t heard the album yet, go listen to it; this article won’t mean much without that experience.
Having become a dedicated fan of Porcupine Tree (and, probably more precisely, Steven Wilson), this new release means a lot more to me than just some new music. The Incident is good; we’ve established that. When you listen to it, it flows, it feels good, it just works. But why? What makes it something really special?
What makes The Incident stand out is its form, the song cycle. Wilson, as I have come to understand it, has been interested in the album as an art form since he was very young. As any piece of art, albums with coherence and unity help artists to convey their meaning. A song cycle is a set of songs, all meant to be heard together in a specific order, often linked with thematic material. It can tell a story or explore a topic, and naturally lends itself to unity.
The first disc is made up of six “core”/longer songs and has eight “transitional”/shorter songs. The short sections provide a contrast, and in some cases a rest, from the core sections. They almost always facilitate a change or shift between the core songs in tempo, mood, style, or tonality. Here’s a song list for reference as well, with transitional/short songs marked (t):
- Occam’s Razor (t)
- The Blind House
- Great Expectations (t)
- Kneel and Disconnect (t)
- Drawing the Line
- The Incident
- Your Unpleasant Family (t)
- The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train (t)
- Time Flies
- Degree Zero of Liberty (t)
- Octane Twisted
- The Seance (t)
- Circle of Manias (t)
- I Drive the Hearse
The most immediate quality of The Incident is its structure. “Time Flies” is the longest of all of the songs, and it falls just about in the middle of the cycle. This creates a natural divide. The music even has a sense of renewal here; “Degree Zero of Liberty (t),” using identical chords and structure and altering only the internal section, clearly references “Occam’s Razor (t).” “Octane Twisted,” using a similar verse and a sharp contrast between gentle chords and heavy guitar riffs, calls faintly back to “The Blind House.” You can see that we are returning to the initial trajectory of the cycle. Such repetition is a pretty clear indication of an arrival to the second part, and helps to unify the beginnings of each half.
Another structural similarity between the two major divisions is the end. The heaviest song on the first half is “The Incident,” which melds into the gentler, but still angry, “Your Unpleasant Family (t).” This completely dissolves into “The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train (t),” before diving into “Time Flies.” The heaviest song on the second half is “Circle of Manias (t),” which leads to the final song, “I Drive the Hearse,” not tapering quite as much as the first half. Together, the beginning and ending of each major part are unified to guide the listener through the cycle. The harsh opening chords, the intense riff-based guitar, and passionate lyrics over lightly processed chords unify the beginning of each half. And the diminuendo ties up the end of each. This symmetry gives the album great balance and flow.
Another technique used to unify The Incident is creating “physical” connections between songs. By physical, I mean that there is no pause or gap between songs. The closest bindings are “Great Expectations (t)” with “Kneel and Disconnect (t),” “The Incident” with “Your Unpleasant Family (t),” and “The Seance (t)” with “Circle of Manias (t).” The first and third occurrences bind two transitional songs together and the second binds a core and transitional song. These couplings ensure that there are no two unbound transitional songs next to each other. They almost function as a single song, preventing the flow from being broken by these shorter songs.
Contrasting this fluidity, both “The Blind House” and “Circle of Manias (t)” offer a brief, silent pause before the next song, allowing the listener to breathe after the heavy, dark mood created by each. Structurally, these pauses book-end the two outer bound song sets, giving way to the expansive fluidity of the rest of the album.
The “transitional” songs present or explore ideas. “The Seance (t)” isn’t connected very closely to “Octane Twisted” in terms of a seamless-shift, but is connected thematically. “The Seance (t)” uses the opening chord progressions from “Octane Twisted” near identically and the vocals verbatim. But it goes a step further and compounds the vocals with another voice and new text. The very first chord in “Occam’s Razor (t)” is expanded on throughout the album. This is seen at the beginning of “The Blind House,” where it is the seed for the main guitar riff. The heavy guitar in the middle of “The Incident” seems to stem from the same idea, although it is transposed down. An even more developed version of this is the bedrock for the heaviest sections of “Octane Twisted.” And this is extrapolated even further into an entire song, “Circle of Manias (t).” The “Occam’s Razor (t)” theme helps to set the listener up for this entire development.
There is more in this album to talk about beside the structural relationships of the piece. Structure is the most immediate characteristic of any music, and doesn’t require much training—other than a decent exposure to music—to intuit. There are issues of tonality, rhythm and meter, lyrical content, and compositional method that I can rave about, but in the remainder of this post I’ll just briefly touch on a few general things.
This cohesive, hour-long musical accomplishment holds together thanks to more than just clever composition. As with any project Steven Wilson has a hand in, pure and genuine humanity, whether dark lows or optimistic highs, are a major part of the work. All of the lyrics are written in the first person, creating an accessible and personable image of the characters and events. Despite the range of emotions and subject matter, everything flows together nicely, not only providing the listener with a varied palette, but one that blurs from color to color.
One idea that drives The Incident comes from Steven Wilson’s obsession with vinyl and the origin of the album. Previous Porcupine Tree albums, such as Fear of a Blank Planet, may be more cohesive because of the lyrical content, but don’t force the average audience to experience the whole. It’s not that they didn’t create unified albums before, but that The Incident has made that unity an obvious focus. The structure essentially forces the listener to go from start to finish.
If you were able to invest in the Limited Deluxe Edition, you know that it's a masterpiece, complete with a gorgeously assembled photo and lyrical account of the album and a stunning illustrated interpretation. $107 is expensive for an album, no matter how you put it, but when I was deciding whether or not I could spare the extra money, I took into consideration what I would be getting and what I would be supporting. I spend hours sifting through artist profiles and web sites with little successful output. Since I don't buy much music, my iTunes library is small; when I find music that draws me in, I buy physical CDs, typically special editions if I can afford them. The average technologically savvy person has an enormous mixture of $0.99 and pirated mp3s shuffling around on their iPods. But for me, discovering an artist that I actually like makes me want to put in and get out as much as I can. I can’t think of a better reason to buy wonderfully crafted music and support talented artists.
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related bits
The Incident | MySpace (low quality, but free)
The Incident | Rhapsody
The Incident | Amazon
