INSURGENTES

Perhaps we should have seen the long Porcupine Tree hiatus between The Incident and Closure/Continuation coming, because prior to knuckling down with Porcupine Tree to tackle The Incident, Steven Wilson put out this solo album which suggested that he was more than willing to continue exploring dark prog territory without Porcupine Tree themselves (though Gavin Harrison does swing by to provide drums on some tracks).

Indeed, Insurgentes prompts the question of "What's the difference between a Steven Wilson solo album and a Porcupine Tree one?", which is harder to answer than you might think. After all, early on Porcupine Tree was very much a Steven Wilson solo project, and it was only really during the sessions for The Sky Moves Sideways that it started evolving into being an actual band. That said, with Wilson being the most prominent vocalist and exerting significant sway over Porcupine Tree's songwriting and aesthetic, one might question what he'd find to do on a prog- oriented solo release which he couldn't already perfectly happily do on a Porcupine Tree album.

To my ears, Insurgentes at first sounds like an exploration of a path not taken by Porcupine Tree themselves. It reminds me a lot of where the band might have gone had they stuck with the Radiohead-adjacent, indie-electronic New Prog sound of the era of Stupid Dream, Lightbulb Sun, or Recordings, rather than going the more prog metal- adjacent direction they took on In Absentia onwards, but still with a similar trajectory towards darker and grimmer sounds rather than staying in the wistful dreamscapes of their late 1990s era. Bit by bit, though, heavier material creeps in, until by Salvaging we're in a sort of doomy post-rock world; if early Porcupine Tree was prone to neo- psychedelic dreaming, this is getting into a very bad trip indeed, though the soothing conclusion to the title track suggests that calmer weather is coming.

As with Porcupine Tree, Insurgentes presents a very modern approach to prog, informed by the past but making no attempt to mimic it. Like I said, it feels like in a parallel universe it could be a Porcupine Tree album, had the project evolved down a different route, but as it stands I'm glad to live in a timeline where we have both Porcupine Tree's metal-tinged mid-2000s direction and this striking artistic statement from Wilson as a solo artist.