ON THE SUNDAY OF LIFE...

On the Sunday of Life..... was the last Porcupine Tree album for me to acquire of the recent reissues. I had it in my head that this was a very scatter shot record, thoughts embedded surely by constant forum rhetoric about the shortcomings of the album--or perhaps a lack of acknowledgment of it in debate at all! Well, the people were right, in a way. On the Sunday of Life..... is all over the place musically. If one's looking for a binding theme to bring it all together, good luck finding one! It is basically a collection of songs from the earliest days of Porcupine Tree, which basically consisted of Steve Wilson in a home studio churning out some of the best Barrett-era Pink Floyd-influenced songs with the comforting overtone of ambiance and space-out music we would come to enjoy from later Porcupine Tree efforts, such as Voyage 34 and Up the Downstair. The musical content is wondrously advanced compared with what I was led to expect from the album. It's still rather raw around the edges, heard especially in the jangling acoustic strums on "Nine Cats," but the production is spot-on throughout.

In the liner notes of On the Sunday of Life....., Wilson reveals that about half of the music this album was all written and recorded in the mid-eighties, when he was still in his high school day! *Cue jaw-dropping* It shows great fortitude on his part, to be sure. Granted that some of the songs are just silly, which may or may not be due to the lyricist on most of the tracks: Alan Duffy, a friend of Wilson. A great many of the songs just scream "SYD BARRETT!!!" with a healthy dose of psychedelia and whimsy almost omnipresent throughout On the Sunday of Life..... Of course, a major exception to this observation would be "Radioactive Toy," which deals with the subject of nuclear paranoia.

Many of the songs on On the Sunday of Life..... are--I don't want to say "throwaway tracks"--but just not incredibly essential. They do add the the feeling of the album without being essential to the Porcupine Tree uninitiated. Basically: don't expect a good 3/4 of these songs to crop up in 21st century Porcupine Tree concerts. My favorite songs would be "On the Sunday of Life.../The Nostalgia Factory," "Radioactive Toy," "Nine Cats," "And the Swallows Dance Above the Sun" and "It Will Rain for a Million Years." These songs alone warrant any fan of spacey music to take a close look at the early stages of Porcupine Tree.

I do indeed enjoy every second of this quirky release, but compared to the rest of Porcupine Tree's career, it is certainly unrefined. On the Sunday of Life..... is a charming release, full of enjoyable if not brilliant songs. Don't be fooled by the rating; it is essential for any hardcore Porcupine Tree fan, and worthy of any music collection.