THE INCIDENT

Porcupine Tree's "The Incident" is a decent, but flawed album. This album draws comparisons to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" in that it is a sprawling concept album that ebbs and flows, yet is lacking in quality as far as individual songs go. Both albums have some absolutely stunning songs, with some lackluster songs filling in the gaps between.

The album starts off with "Occam's Razor", which I wholly believe was designed to scare the shit out of everyone as soon as they pop the album in. There's really nothing to this track, and has no individual merit. The loud explosions of noise reappear later in the album on the track "Degree Zero of Liberty" to wake up anyone who might have fallen asleep during the course of the album.

Strong tracks include "The Blind House", which contains some of Porcupine Tree's signature (as of In Absentia anyway) metallic riffs and haunting vocals, "The Incident", which vaguely reminds me of "Hypnotek" from Richard Barbieri's latest solo outing mixed with "Sleep Together" from Fear of a Blank Planet, "Time Flies", a track which recalls Animals-era Pink Floyd (as stated by at least a dozen other people), "Octane Twisted/The Séance", which probably would have been better as a single track, and "Circle of Manias" which has a single prominent riff that develops throughout the course of the song.

The main gimmick with this album is the idea of the album being a single long track split into multiple sections. Well, okay. Isn't that what all concept albums are essentially meant to be? My main problem with this is with the way the tracks were split. More than a couple of times while listening to the album, I found myself wondering why they even bothered splitting some of the tracks the way they did. Perhaps to piss off anybody wanting to listen to any of the songs individually rather than the whole album? A perfect example of this are the tracks "Octane Twisted" and "The Séance", which are barely different enough from each other to warrant a split. It'd be like splitting "Anesthetize" from Fear of a Blank planet into separate tracks just because some parts had slight differences in melody or pacing.

Another problem with the album is an underdeveloped concept that never really seems to go anywhere. Steven Wilson himself has stated that he started writing the album with a specific concept in mind, and ended up turning it inward and writing songs pertaining to his own life. As such, you end up with an album that goes in many different directions, and then ends up getting lost somewhere along the way.

The second disc is also a bit of a mixed bag. After having listened to the album several times, the only tracks that really stand out to me are "Flicker" and "Bonnie the Cat". "Black Dahlia" doesn't really go anywhere and "Remember Me Lover" is one of Steven Wilson's typical angry "love" songs.

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