XM

As the title implies, Porcupine Tree's XM is a live-in-the-studio session for XM radio in Washington D.C. - as such, it doesn't have the ambience of a live album, but it does showcase the capacity of the band to pull off this material in person. As one might expect from a November 2002 session, material from In Absentia features heavily - in fact, six of the titles here come from it, with the remaining tracks all coming from Stupid Dream. We're quite far away here from Porcupine Tree's space rock roots, as a result, and more in the realm of the heavy prog music that they made the focus of their work for the 2000s, with touches of the indie rock-influenced prog of their late 1990s era adding an extra dose of variety here and there. It might not offer a whole lot that In Absentia and Stupid Dream didn't already offer, but when you are dealing with albums that are as good as those two, "more of the same" doesn't sound half bad.