Warthur This is one of several live releases which capture Porcupine Tree performing in the wake of Fear of a Blank Planet, perhaps the height of their 2000s powers before 2009's The Incident split opinions and took a little of the shine off the band.

As the title implies, it's taken from their appearance the Isolaarirock Festival in Finland, and as is often the case with festival sets that makes it a somewhat different beast from live releases sourced from a concert where the act in question is headlining. The necessity to stick to a festival running time prompts Porcupine Tree to pick out a setlist tightly focused on more immediately gripping songs, and whilst it also limits the extent to which they can zoot off on flights of fancy, this nonetheless is a capably performed set performed for a clearly appreciative crowd.

Save for Lightbulb Sun, only songs from In Absentia, Deadwing, and Fear of a Blank Planet are included, and on the whole the setlist makes a good case for the band's 2000s-era output.

Warthur Nil Recurring is a fairly simple EP to review in some respects. Did you like Fear of a Blank Planet? Would you like more Porcupine Tree in that particular vein, consisting of a brace of songs (some devised in those sessions, some only coming together afterwards)? Does the idea of Robert Fripp paying a visit to lend his guitar and some blessing to a band as important to progressive rock in the 2000s as King Crimson was in their heyday appeal to you? Then you probably already have listened to Nil Recurring - but if you haven't, don't snooze on it, because whilst some secondary Porcupine Tree releases are a little ancillary (Metanoia, for instance, is an acquired taste), Nil Recurring is of much the same standard as the album that preceded it.

Or do you think Fear of a Blank Planet was rubbish? I don't agree with you... but Nil Recurring won't persuade you to like this phase of Porcupine Tree any more than you already do.

Warthur Hailing from a live performance originally broadcast on German television, this hails from the Deadwing tour, coming a month or so after the material captured on the Arriving Somewhere live release. For the most part the setlist concentrates on recent material from In Absentia and Deadwing (and non-album tracks from the same era), though The Start of Something Beautiful and Radioactive Toy pop up to offer something from Up the Downstair and On the Sunday of Life respectively. As one might expect from performances recorded professionally for TV, the sound quality is decent, and overall this is another fine live release, though if you are not a big Porcupine Tree you may find this is a little redundant next to Arriving Somewhere, which draws on a somewhat wider range of their back catalogue at that.

Warthur This is the followup to XM, and is another live-in-the-studio recording by Porcupine Tree for XM radio in Washington D.C., this time from 2003. The original XM leaned very strongly on material from In Absentia, recorded as it was early in the process of touring and promoting that album.

This album ends up being a somewhat more varied prospect, as well as a highly interesting one - because the first XM used so much In Absentia material, here they go lighter on it (though it's not absent - there's a nice version of Trains here) but fill out the setlist with tunes from a more diverse range of releases. These go as far back as Up the Downstair, but the band also lean heavily on Lightbulb Sun for these performances.

What really gets interesting is that the band are still very much in In Absentia mode when they are playing this material - adding an extra dose of edge and heaviness to the proceedings, with the result that you get a somewhat fresher take on familiar stuff here.

The end result is a rather unique setlist - certainly not something the band would have put together if they'd had a completely free hand in song choice, but because so much of their recent material had been already used on the first XM session and they wanted to avoid redundancy, we ended up with this intriguing, one-of-a-kind performance.

Warthur As the title implies, Porcupine Tree's XM is a live-in-the-studio session for XM radio in Washington D.C. - as such, it doesn't have the ambience of a live album, but it does showcase the capacity of the band to pull off this material in person. As one might expect from a November 2002 session, material from In Absentia features heavily - in fact, six of the titles here come from it, with the remaining tracks all coming from Stupid Dream. We're quite far away here from Porcupine Tree's space rock roots, as a result, and more in the realm of the heavy prog music that they made the focus of their work for the 2000s, with touches of the indie rock-influenced prog of their late 1990s era adding an extra dose of variety here and there. It might not offer a whole lot that In Absentia and Stupid Dream didn't already offer, but when you are dealing with albums that are as good as those two, "more of the same" doesn't sound half bad.

Warthur Focusing on the more metal-oriented material from Deadwing and In Absentia - though notably steering it back in a more rock-oriented direction in order to allow this material to sit a little more comfortably beside the "indie prog rock" stylings of Stupid Dream, Lightbulb Sun and Recordings (picks from all of which surface here). Fans of their earlier psychedelic and space rock styles might be disappointed that those aren't represented, but on the plus side there's a liberal sprinkling of rarities here such as the glorious Buying New Soul as well as Revenant, So-Called Friend and Mother and Child Divided, those three songs having only appeared on various special editions of Deadwing. Not the definitive Porcupine Tree live experience, but a pretty decent one nonetheless.