Author: Peter Podbrežnik, Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Porcupine Tree
Label: Lava Records
Release: 2005
Length: 59:35
Rating: 5/5
review author no. 2: Peter Podbrežnik (25.7.2016)
By the time Porcupine Tree dropped their eighth studio album, »Deadwing«, they were at a creative peak, and with it they scored a commercial success that was unimaginable for a progressive rock band, one that their next record, »Fear of a Blank Planet« (2007), would top two years later. According to bandleader, singer, guitarist and producer Steven Wilson, »Deadwing« is a ‘ghost story’, but it isn’t really a proper concept album, since Steven has never wanted to give up the details of its concept to this day. Most of the lyrics were inspired by a screenplay Steven wrote together with Mike Bannion, who hasn’t revealed any big details about the story either. That’s probably the main reason the album’s concept is still a huge riddle, honestly one of the biggest enigmas in modern progressive rock. Steven has said more than once that he’d love for the script to become the basis of a ghost movie someday, but apparently we’ll have to wait quite a few more years for that.
The tracks »Shallow« and »Lazarus«, today among Porcupine Tree’s most recognizable achievements, came out as the album’s lead singles. »Shallow« even ended up as background music in the American movie »Four Brothers«, which definitely helped put Porcupine Tree on the radar of the wider masses. Steven’s lyrics were once again full of self-reflection, melancholic nostalgia in the wake of failed love affairs and wrong life choices, and also bitter criticism of modern, dehumanized society. At the same time, Wilson’s typical split between love and death, or light and darkness, runs through the whole of »Deadwing«. The atmosphere on the album ranges from shattering melancholy, incredible darkness and occasional outbursts of pure aggression to a breathtaking ethereality of the kind prog rock hadn’t heard since the legendary Pink Floyd, one of Steven’s key musical influences.
Stylistically, on »Deadwing« Porcupine Tree took another step forward in soaking up hard-hitting progressive metal elements into their art-rock-psychedelic-metal sonic collage, the one that blew everyone away on the previous masterpiece, »In Absentia« (2002). Before »Deadwing« came out, plenty of the band’s followers wondered whether Steven and the gang could pull off a worthy successor to a masterpiece like »In Absentia«. Steven and his partners in crime, keyboardist Richard Barbieri, bassist Colin Edwin and drummer Gavin Harrison, didn’t let anyone down. What’s more, »Deadwing« is in many ways a mature, atmospheric upgrade of its splendid predecessor, which puts it among the best achievements in the history of these English prog rock greats. The special guests on the album were cult American guitarist and singer Adrian Belew (ex-King Crimson) and workaholic Swedish guitarist and singer Mikael Akerfeldt (Opeth), who contributed solos on various tracks. Akerfeldt, who also chipped in backing vocal harmonies here and there, became Wilson’s friend and regular musical collaborator. Their partnership later gave birth to an interesting project called Storm Corrosion.
The title track, which in its closing section features Belew’s trademark ‘wacky’ guitar solo, makes for a fascinating album opener, since it keeps just the right balance between punch and a soothing atmosphere, while mostly sitting at a mid-tempo. The intro, with its sharpened guitar riffs and furious drum fills, soon makes room for melancholic arrangements, tied together with the mellotron realm mainly by Steven’s ethereal vocals. All the while a mysterious, dark mood dominates the atmosphere, conjuring up ghosts from the past as if on a bet. The aforementioned prog-metal crusher »Shallow« is one of the most brutal achievements in Porcupine Tree history, and amid the furious guitar passages it features a hard-hitting yet extremely simple chorus that’s also atmospherically uplifting. The single originally came out only for the American market, but a few copies, before they could be destroyed, accidentally found their way onto the European market too. The band found out and quickly bought them back, then sold them at shows, signed, for 40 €.
The next single from the album was the ballad »Lazarus«, which creates an incredible contrast with the previous track. »Lazarus« is probably the most beautiful ballad in Porcupine Tree history so far, and Wilson still plays it regularly at his solo shows. Its lyrics are about the ghost of a mother talking from the afterlife to her son David while he stands at her grave. Plenty of people speculated right when it came out that David is actually Steven’s tribute to one of his musical heroes, David Bowie, which Wilson himself confirmed in person many years later. Steven’s touching vocal performance, together with Akerfeldt’s backing harmonies and the melancholic piano arrangements, creates an indescribably beautiful and uplifting atmospheric magic that instantly carries the listener off into a very pleasant, nostalgic daze.
»Halo«, laced with alt-rock elements and plenty of improvisation, and featuring, among other things, thick bass lines and a clever use of the vocoder, is a much darker and more complex creation, where the balance between melody and experimentation is once again just right, so the track reaches a convincing climax in its outstanding chorus. A cross between psychedelia and prog metal, »Arriving Somewhere But Not Here«, where the intro is ruled by assorted dissonant effects on keyboards and guitar, is the complete triumph of exceptional melancholy. The vocal harmonies between Wilson and Akerfeldt, especially in the chorus, are the atmospheric peak of this shattering lament. And in the closing section, a proper metal cataclysm kicks in, with brutal double-kick hits and dizzying guitar passages.
The mellotron has had an important place in Porcupine Tree’s sound ever since they became a band in the true sense of the word, so it’s more than fitting that they dedicated a track to it called »Mellotron Scratch«, which is also one of the highlights of »Deadwing«. The psychedelic-leaning melody is laced with subtle guitar passages, a melancholic vocal performance and mellotron waves. The highlights of this brilliant ballad are its wonderfully nostalgic chorus and a gorgeous finish with swelling vocal harmonies. Great moments on »Deadwing« don’t run out anyway. »Open Car« is definitely among them, and it’s also one of the best compositions in Porcupine Tree history. A brutally dark opening is followed by an incredibly fluid and subtle transition into a melancholic section with gorgeous vocal harmonies and a gentle piano melody. A shattering atmosphere reigns from start to finish of this masterpiece, while its absolute peak is the epic closing part.
»Start of Something Beautiful« opens with a tense rhythmic build-up and fleeting keyboard effects, which lasts all the way to the punchy chorus, when metal guitar passages and a cunning use of the vocoder push their way to the front. The big peak arrives with an unexpected burst of third-part harmonies in the middle of the closing section, which suddenly turns this very good composition into a timeless work of musical art. »Glass Arm Shattering« is a fully psychedelic finale with romantic guitar-and-keyboard harmonies and yet another brilliant, this time slightly more ‘dreamy’ vocal performance from Steven.
The flawless masterpiece »Deadwing« was in many ways one of the peaks of Wilson’s remarkable musical journey and of his body of work with the unforgettable Porcupine Tree. For a short while they even became the ‘darlings’ of the wider masses, which honestly scared the hell out of most of the longtime fans, who feared they would ‘sell out’ to the corrupting influence of the music industry, which Wilson has always been extremely critical of. Of course that didn’t happen, but it was still a hell of a lot of fun to see a progressive rock act at the top of the charts again after so long. With »Deadwing«, which in many ways was an upgrade of its predecessor »In Absentia« and even won an award for outstanding sound quality (in Wilson’s production, of course), Porcupine Tree finally grabbed the baton as the leading and most influential band in modern progressive rock, and it was only right that, after the Scandinavian-American ‘invasion’ of the nineties, that baton ended up in English hands again.
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review author no. 1: Aleš Podbrežnik (24.2.2006)
The band’s seventh “real” studio album is another unforgettable musical adventure, one that simply confirms that all the assorted yapping about how everything in “rock” has already been sung, said and revealed, and how the spirit of “rock” has long been dead thanks to an oversaturation where you can no longer tell authenticity from a “scam”, is pure “thrash talk”. The review will run long, because this is a record that offers so much more information than your average “rock” album today. If you can’t be bothered to read a review, just skip straight to listening to “Deadwing”, which is honestly the smartest move you can make.
Porcupine Tree, led by an out-of-series artist, multi-instrumentalist and perfect musical “perpetuum mobile” as far as the perception of the phenomenon of music goes, the miracle worker Steven Wilson, serve up a new album that marks a bold new evolutionary step forward for the band! Experimental to the core, this time dosed with even more “rock” composure. Porcupine Tree have always been the embodiment of a perfect union of classicism and neo-avant-garde sounds in their own peculiar blend of psychedelia and space-experimental visions of “rock”. The word “progressive” is spot on. The Brits, who alongside Ozric Tentacles developed a fully representative style in the post-Gong era (OT and PT each in their own direction), one you can’t pigeonhole anywhere or find a proper parallel for. That’s why Porcupine Tree are a fearless, experimentally free-spirited band from head to toe, and could serve as an ideal example to the entire rock world today. The album is a logical continuation of the injection of tougher riff elements that Porcupine Tree began hinting at with “Stupid Dream” (1999) and that “Lightbulb Sun” (2000), and especially “In Absentia” (2002), only confirmed. This time Wilson was searching in music for the right formula to merge the modern trendy looks of something like stoner rock or hardcore with Porcupine Tree’s usual mission (Open Car even recalls, in that kind of merging, the approach of fusers like Tool). To breathe the desired dose of craziness, or in plain talk “screwed-up-ness”, into “Deadwing”, Wilson invited none other than the master of alternative rock, the brilliant Adrian Belew, driving force of the current incarnation of King Crimson. Belew is the embodiment of injecting otherness that can become avant-garde at any moment, and Belew is really a “quiet” avant-garde, an avant-garde “in opposition”. Besides Belew, Mikael Akerfeldt (Opeth) also played guitar and sang on the record, returning the favor to Wilson.
Of course, for all his personal uniqueness, Wilson is no slouch either, and the arrangements of his artful drum and computer samples, synth “space-cadet” stuff stretched over hefty mellotron sounds, “glissando” guitar jumps and his recognizable singing, often delivered with tasteful use of “filter” effects that really make the vocal sound like it’s beaming into the music from another galaxy, shine in all the glow of the new record. And with this combination of new elements forging a new look for Porcupine Tree, Wilson’s mind once again works triumphantly.
Let’s walk through the material. In the first part especially, the poetry deals with questions of life and death. The band strikes wild with the title song, built of course on the expected mellotron and sample PT spices. Laid over it is a massive curtain of guitar riffing. The track is fluid, and PT stage a truly dramatic mood in it. The motifs are beautifully joined into a whole, the mood doesn’t let up for a single millimeter, and the drama spins by in the blink of an eye. The successor, Shallow, wears an especially interesting look for PT, with a thick, heavy riff at the heart of the song giving the track an outstanding groove, a groove with a nu-metal color, and the track could have come out as a single without any problem, especially thanks to the fantastically built chorus that ignites “on first listen”. The vocal is dramatic, “lost” inside the massive distortion of the simple riffing that sends the blood racing through the listener’s veins “from the get-go”. PT put the ball down on the ground with Lazarus (also released as a single, on 14.03.2005). A simple half-ballad calms the electrified mood. It’s a song that serves the same function on the record as, if we take King Crimson’s Eyes Wide Open as a comparison, the one that discharges the opening “crash and boom” of the KC record “The Power To Believe” (2003). A glissando guitar with a steel-pedal sound in the chorus, as if played by the awesome David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), a gorgeous romance for the evening, bathing in the glow of moonlight by a lake. Then you take a guitar in your hands and bag yourself some babe with it (well, too bad the days of the troubadours are gone)…Juicily woven. Simple, but extremely tasteful. Next comes the paranoid psychedelic piece Halo, with outstanding vocal arrangements, a mix of “a cappella” and electronic flashes that seem to come either from a phone booth or a radio… God is everywhere, in the fingertips, in the head. God is fear, truth, power, proof, passion, hope, meaning, pain,… Who is God? The state apparatus, or are we God? Both. Is it a “blessing” or a “curse” of humankind? Again, the same answer. If not earlier on the record, then in this track the guitar “freak” Adrian Belew is definitely on the solo. The track carries a nervy solo that, in sound and style, most probably grew in Adrian Belew’s own backyard, since it features that characteristic kneading of notes outside the frame of school music scales, resulting in a torn-off solo with screaming squeals over a killer “sustain” effect, which contributes superbly to the wit and the rise in dynamics and the theatrics themselves. Once again the combination of a simple riff with gentle piano arrangements and a hard “beat” form feels great. A combination of composed and absent in the ideal proportion. A track in the vein of, say, Four Chords That Made A Million (“Lightbulb Sun”, 2000), especially in the vocal effect in the chorus.
So with “Deadwing”, Porcupine Tree remain a hot spot of the progressive world of rock music, and their unpredictability keeps surprising brilliantly. Always their own, with an ideal jigsaw of avant-garde sounds, psychedelia, space drifting, dramatic atmosphere, ethereal effect and constantly changing their own look in 1000 and one ways. Endlessly listenable, challenging, not looking anywhere else, just listening to the inner voice and expressing themselves. A band I’d dare say is, in its creativity and exceptional intellect, worthy of succeeding the great pioneers of the early seventies. “Deadwing” is a record you can read for a very long time and never get bored for a single moment.
Lineup
Steven Wilson – vocals, guitar, piano, bass guitar, keyboards, “hammered dulcimer”
Richard Barbieri – keyboards, synthesizer
Colin Edwin – bass guitar
Gavin Harrison – drums, percussion
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Mikael Åkerfeldt (OPETH) – guitar, vocals
Adrian Belew (KING CRIMSON) – guitar
Production
Steven Wilson
Tracklist
1. Deadwing (9:46)
2. Shallow (4:17)
3. Lazarus (4:18)
4. Halo (4:38)
5. Arriving Somewhere But Not Here (12:02)
6. Mellotron Scratch (6:56)
7. Open Car (3:46)
8. The Start Of Something Beautiful (7:39)
9. Glass Arm Shattering (6:12)
Album length: 59:34
