LIGHTBULB SUN

Rating this album was not an easy task. While continuing the Stupid Dream's effort to put their sound towards the more convencional pop/rock structures, the band still managed to explore, perhaps their most with great success, new domains for progression.

Nevertheless, in the more "conventional" side of the band, we clearly regognize Steven Wilson's signature. Tracks like "How is your life today", "The Rest Will Flow" and "Shesmovedon" flow, very balanced, in a cascade of nostalgic backing vocals. The latter, "Shesmovedon", would rapidly become a Porcupine Tree's classic, blending to its memorable chorus an heartbreaking guitar solo in its final. The opener "Lightbulb Sun", though not being specially complex, the band shows high mastery on balancing perfectly its several arrangements, making it as almost as it had in fact a basic structure. Every aspect of its components was placed perfectly, from several accoustic guitar moments, modern heavy guitar riffs, feeled guitar solos creating a perfect ambience of nostalgic joyfulness. In "Four Courds That Made a Million" the distorted electric guitar create a strange effect while in the spacey three-phase-structure "Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth" is memorable for its incorporation of the videotape of the Heaven's Gate leader's last words before the massive suicide in 1997. The inventive "Hatesong" is the most psychadelic of the collection, a song that the band would transform later in their technical peak.

But the album standout is the impressive "Russia on Ice", a memorable space epic, in an almost post-rock way, incorporating several symphonic arrangements. The music flows transmitting a horde of feelings in the depressive camp, giving the sensation of a cosmic pause in Time, until the sonic power of its cathartic end. Once more the celestial backing vocals help to encore a ethereal beauty on it. An impressive moment of music!

A very delicate aproach to music in a very dynamic album. Within its pretension, it reinvented progressive rock, particularly in Russia on Ice.