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Porcupine Tree - On the Sunday of Life... CD (album) cover

ON THE SUNDAY OF LIFE...

Porcupine Tree

 

Heavy Prog

3.03 | 970 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Time Signature
1 stars On the silliness of life...

Let me start out by offering my sincerest apologies to the die hard Porcupine Tree fans out there for writing this negative review. But the truth is that, while I love Porcupine Tree's other releases, I just cannot stand this one.

The music on this album is a mixture of 80s new wave music and 90s alternative rock. Now there's nothing wrong with this. In fact, combining the best of both worlds would be probably have an astonishing result which would be an instant hit worldwide. The problem is that "On the Sunday of Life..." takes the worst of both worlds and combine it into an utterly disastrous combination of the pretentious and arrogant elements of the new wave and alternative rock movements which manifests itself in an album which is generally just silly, and for some reasons it reminds me of Babylon Zoo's "Spaceman" song. Normally, I don't mind silliness and oddball humor, which I tend to find charming, but, somehow, the silliness of this album does not catch on with me at all and just comes across as pretentious and arrogant (maybe I come across that way, too, in this review, for which I then apologize).

That being said the album does have its moments such as the seemingly improv instrumentals "Music for the Head", "Third Eye Surfer", "Begonia Seduction Scene", and "On the Sunday of Life". The introduction to "The Nostalgia Factory" is also interesting, and, while the verses are horrible, it does contain a number of redeeming instrumental sections. "Radioactive Toys" also has its moments and is actually not a half-bad song. Most other tracks are just silly as in the case of "Jupiter Island", "Linton Samuel Lawson", "And The Swallows Dance Above", and to some extent "This Long Silence" although there is something about it that makes it stand out as worth listening to. The best track is without doubt the mostly instrumental "It Will Rain For A Million Years".

Who would I recommend this album to? I don't know. I assume that the instrumentals will appeal to a number of different people, because the instrumental tracks are actually quite good. I can imagine that little children will like a lot of the songs on the album although many of the annoying fillers on the album will probably be too creepy. I'd probably recommend to fans of progressive music that they (legally) download the instrumental tracks plus "It Will Rain for a Million Years" and perhaps "Radioactive Toys" and "This Long Silence" and ignore the rest of the tracks on the album.

Time Signature | 1/5 |

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