ON THE SUNDAY OF LIFE...

Porcupine Tree's debut "On The Sunday Of Life?" is a strange oddity compiled from two prior cassette releases "Tarquin's Seaweed Farm" (1989) and "The Nostalgia Factory" (1990). Nobody cared about the band back then but it is nice to revisit the past after hearing how brilliant this band became. If you are lookin for the masterpiece material of "In Absentia", "Deadwing", or "Fear of a Blank Planet" you beter look elsewhere as you are not going to find it here. This music on the debut is psychedelic and spacey beyond belief. It is raher astonishing as to where the band came from. They were deep into Hawkwind sounds merged with psychedelica.

Songs such as space rocker 'Jupiter Island' are as far removed from recent Porcupine Tree as one can imagine. It even features spacey Hawkwind guitar lead, and a chugging hypno rhythm. The vocals are a real surprise, Wilson's soft gentle touches are absent as he focuses on psychedelic tones, and a freak out coda with sonic space sounds is the climax.

The psychedelic tracks are akin to early Pink Floyd or 13th Floor Elevators or The Sonics. 'Third Eye Surfer' and 'On the Sunday of Life' exude experimental druggy atmospheres, sounding like Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. Most of the tracks are similar, very psychedelic and trippy, but there are some genuine highlights to mention. 'The Nostalgia Factory' has a nice keyboard motif driving it and at last some actual tempos, sounding like a song, with a great wah-wah lead guitar.

The next great moment you can skip to is 'Radioactive Toy', a classic live song for the band and it is a definitive highlight on this hodge podge album. I love the infectious tine and the killer lead work at the end is incredible. I love the melody of 'Nine Cats' that follows and lifts the album up after a sea of mediocrity. Following this is 'Hymn', that should be renamed ho- hum, very bland tripped out noise, then 'Footprints' follows (no pun intended), with dreamy keys and acoustics, and some dull spoken poetry, returning to psychedelica.

Overall this is a curio for PT collectors only. Tread carefully as you travel back through time before Steven Wilson actually produced excellent albums.

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