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By: Dennis Cook
Inside The Warfield in San Francisco, a full house is tensed and alert like bloodhounds that've caught the scent of fresh game. Onstage only a few minutes, Porcupine Tree is generating a thick, hypnotic atmosphere as they move through The Incident, their tenth studio album, released September 14 on new label home Roadrunner Records, just four days prior. The lack of familiarity seems to matter not a bit to the rapt audience, who are floored by the rush of sound and barrage of evocative imagery blurring by on the screen above the stage. In the 18 years since their 1991 debut, On the Sunday of Life..., Porcupine Tree has built up a rapport and respect with their fans that allows them to take chances, like presenting a brand new release in its entirety before most have had an opportunity to absorb it in more than surface ways. Such is the force and seductive passion of their work that one is glad to go wherever they might travel.
Led by songwriter-guitarist-singer Steven Wilson, U.K.-based Porcupine Tree shares a strong resonance with greats like Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and King Crimson, but also drip with modernity. Listening to the their long-form ideas unfold it's clear Wilson has absorbed the production and creative sensibilities of electronica, indie rock and the forward-minded heaviness of Mastadon and Meshuggah. While often lumped into the prog rock category, Porcupine Tree transcends simple descriptors by a resolute drive to create something that is theirs and theirs alone. The feel conjures up Floyd, et al. but the sound is their baby. And that child has grown and grown and grown since their inception, moving from years of intense, solitary work by Wilson into a startlingly gifted, emotionally charged quartet – Wilson (vocals, guitars, piano), Richard Barbieri (keys), Colin Edwin (bass) and Gavin Harrison (drums) – making some of the densest, ambitious and strangely satisfying rock today.
 Porcupine Tree |
Live, the group is augmented by stellar guitarist John Wesley, who's worked with Marillion, Sister Hazel, and Fish, which further thickens their stew. Add to this dramatic lighting effects, an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing film/video element keyed to nearly every track in the setlist - much of it the product of the whacked, fevered imagination of Danish photographer/filmmaker Lasse Hoile, who has been crucial in defining the tone and image of the band for many years - and a commitment to full, enfolding sound production and you've got one of the finest touring units around. Like their studio releases, Porcupine Tree's concerts strive to be an experience and not just another night on the town, and their fervent, ever-growing fan base worldwide speaks to the success of their efforts, despite an almost total non-acquiescence to traditional marketing schemes and consciously populist shaping.
This is a band that stands apart, and this remove stems from their leader, who is the antithesis of a rock star despite his group's increasing profile. Wilson is the definition of well spoken, slicing into things with great insight, endlessly trying to figure out what makes his music and, in a very palpable way, the world tick. There's little time for subterfuge and fluff in Porcupine Tree, and the intensity of their music matches the heightened tensions of modern life, where strata of information and input is heaped upon strata, day after day after day. From lonely piano surrounded by subtle effects to heavy metal thick storms to reverberant glitch-scapes, Porcupine Tree straddles an enormous emotional range sonically and lyrically, yet does so in a way that continually connects one to the intrinsics of being human.
JamBase had the good fortune of speaking with Wilson for a few minutes before The Warfield gig, which proved a real triumph in scope, execution and reception. Despite The Incident's newness, not a few people were singing along, eyes wide and wet, faces shining with an intensity to match the band's own. There was no escaping the feeling that one was witnessing a band worthy of joining the pantheon of its ancestors, and whose sincerity, talent, vision and singular nature, both in the studio and in performance, mark them as one of today's great bands.
JamBase: I think it's ambitious of any band to try and perform an entire new album live. You're presenting music to people that's just come out and doesn't have the goodwill and affection the back catalog has built up.
 Steven Wilson - Porcupine Tree |
Steven Wilson: The idea comes from the philosophy that the band has always had, which is the idea of the album as a musical continuum. Really, the idea is to extend that through the show in live presentation. There are precedents for this, mostly from the '70s; this idea that you can do more than just record ten songs and throw them together, and that you can present a show that's more than just a setlist of randomly ordered songs. I think there's something about albums and shows like that if you get it right – the dynamics and flow and evolution of the music right throughout the show and throughout the album – you can really leave the listener with the impression that they've really traveled somewhere. It's a bit like in a movie or a novel, where you go through many different moods, emotions, and feelings. You don't often get that with music, so for me it's almost a cinematic device to try and juxtapose different emotions and different styles of music across the scale to really take the listener on a journey.
JamBase: I'm glad you brought up movies because in trying to describe the character of The Incident it's almost easier to point to the episodic filmmaking of Robert Altman or a movie like Crash, which offer a series of interlocking scenes, though the connections are rarely obvious at first glance – a collection of non-obvious congruences that gels into something far larger than the individual tales.
Steven Wilson: I didn't work lyrically on it with any great theme in mind, but as I worked on it I started to notice connections to things in the media and things in my own past, biographical things. At the end of the day, we all have a shared human experience. We all understand what it's like to have a love affair not go right or what it's like to feel anger about something going on in the media. So, it's very easy to weave stories together and make them feel complete, and I think the trick is in how you structure things. And I think that something we do that's really unique and special is in the architecture of the music. People say we're a prog rock band, but for me prog rock was always more about the technique and musicianship, and that's not the case with Porcupine Tree. We write simple music, but where the complexity comes in is the architecture and structure. That's something I've worked very hard on over the course of 25 years now, trying to get that right. And [The Incident] is a further step in that evolution.
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