PORCUPINE TREE — The Incident (review)

PORCUPINE TREE — The Incident album cover Album · 2009 · Metal Related Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
Warthur
It took me a long time to warm to The Incident. Part of the issue is the presentation: supposedly it's one big 55 minute piece and a coda of a few additional songs on the second CD, but it's pretty self-evident that the 55 minute piece was conceived as separate songs (there's even bits where the music flat-out stops and then another "song" starts), so the idea that this was Porcupine Tree's Thick as a Brick or something is at best tenuous.

In fact, with less than 20 minutes of material on CD 2, it would really have been entirely possible to just put this out as a single-CD album, and indeed that's exactly what the most recent CD reissue has done. This makes it feel like the original release was to an extent a calculated attempt to play with the appetites of the prog fanbase, since the market was all too willing to buy 2CD albums which could have happily been a single disc if the filler were trimmed away.

Still, at least Porcupine Tree do us the favour of not bothering with the filler. At points feeling like a natural development of the sound of Fear of a Blank Planet, at other stages the album captures the band testing out other sounds. This isn't necessarily always to its benefit - Drawing the Line finds Steven Wilson attempting a forceful, hard-rocking chorus which is, to say the least, not very Porcupine Tree and also not particularly convincing - and in general it feels like the band were flailing around a bit here looking for a new direction and not finding one, which I suppose is why they went on a long hiatus after this.

Still, even if I don't quite think it hangs together as a cohesive piece of work, it's got lots of compelling bits and pieces here and there, and so I think my previous two and a half star assessment of it was about 1 star's worth too stingy. It's far from bad - in fact, it's mostly good, but from Porcupine Tree we're used to great.
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