An In-the-Moment Review of the New Porcupine Tree Song That May or May Not Age Poorly Depending on How the Rest of the Album Cycle Shakes Loose
“You’re gonna be waiting a long time, mate, that band doesn’t exist anymore.”
— Steven Wilson, 2016
This is mind-blowing.
First, some background. When Porcupine Tree first went on hiatus following the Royal Albert Hall show in late 2010, I was one of those insufferable weirdos who was like, oh, when Steven Wilson’s done with the album cycle for Grace for Drowning, then he’ll get back to Porcupine Tree. And then I was like, oh, when he’s done with the release and touring cycle for Raven, then he’ll get back to Porcupine Tree. And on and on like that. Not helping matters was Wilson’s insistence at the time that he would be coming back to Porcupine Tree eventually, even if only as a side project, and how I extravagantly did not care for the technical jazz-fusioney compositions that Wilson was releasing at the time, and how I wanted Steven Wilson to release something that I actually liked for once. And so I spent so much of the early part of last decade reading Wilson’s public statements for tea leaves indicating that a Porcupine Tree reunion was imminent, even as Wilson himself distanced himself ever further from the idea.
Gradually, though, as the 2010s advanced I began to make my peace with the idea that Porcupine Tree would never reunite. Part of it was how beginning with Hand. Cannot. Erase. in 2015 Wilson toned down the impenetrable, frankly masturbatory classic-prog influences dominating his solo work thus far and began moving in a direction that aligned closer to my tastes. Another part was the way Wilson slowly began reintroducing Porcupine Tree songs into his live sets, so it didn’t feel like we’d never hear the old songs again. (As a bonus, the songs that made the cut were generally bangers, which was nice.) And so when Wilson finally ruled out the possibility of a Porcupine Tree reunion the following year, it still hurt, but it didn’t hurt as much as it could have.
And so I moved on, as, seemingly, did the band members. Steven Wilson and Richard Barbieri were busy with their own solo projects, Colin Edwin did some guest musician work and formed a band of his own, and Gavin Harrison started drumming for King Crimson. And yet, and yet, and yet…
My blog documenting Steven Wilson’s discography album by album has a small running thread through it, stolen and bastardized from Alan Moore, that art is magic and can have a profound effect on the world and the people in it, and magic, in turn, is a useful way to holistically make sense of the world. I plan on describing a six-album cycle spanning from Insurgentes in 2008 to Octane Twisted in 2012 as a magical ritual meant to kill off Porcupine Tree and anoint Wilson’s solo career as its successor. The trouble is, the narrative goes, that they fucked it up. I liked The Incident well enough personally, but I know it underwhelmed for a lot of people, and for as good as it was they still closed it out with the worst song they ever wrote. In addition, the recording of their final show was botched, and so what was supposed to be their big triumphant sendoff was reduced to a few bonus tracks on Octane Twisted’s second disc. We are left wanting. The ritual’s incompleteness meant that Porcupine Tree became a ghost, haunting everything Wilson would release afterward. (How appropriate, then, that Raven is a whole album about ghost stories…)
And so, you have Gavin Harrison performing live with Steven Wilson and releasing a Porcupine Tree covers album in 2015. You have Barbieri, who’s been through this song and dance before with Japan, stating in an interview in 2017 that Wilson “has blown hot and cold with [the possibility of a reunion] in the press at various times,” indicating that even though he’s not holding his breath, when Wilson says it’s over that doesn’t necessarily mean it really is. You have people like me wishing Porcupine Tree would just go on a reunion tour or something so we’d get the closure we need. You have Tim Bowness stating in Time Flies, the band’s unauthorized biography, that even though Porcupine Tree’s breakup was not the most amicable (everyone was exhausted and stressed out and tensions were high), if you got them all in a room again they’d start playing and realize there’s more that unites them than divides them. And then you have Richard Barbieri as the opening act for Wilson’s Royal Albert Hall residency in 2018, during which they got together and played Buying New Soul, and managed to rekindle some of the old magic that made Porcupine Tree great to begin with.
After this, the rumors started flying. We’d heard that Wilson and Barbieri were talking regularly again. And then Wilson, Barbieri, and Harrison all got together and registered something called “Porcupine 3.” (Edwin was and is not involved, and it seems that bridge has been burnt for good. I’m sure he has his reasons.) And then Wilson said the band might release something when we least expect it, and teased a guitar-based project as his album release for 2022. And then Porcupine Tree’s website got a fresh redesign. And then the band’s social media lit up with cryptic fragments of something enigmatically called “P/T C/C,” teasing some sort of big announcement on November 1.
I had fully accepted that Porcupine Tree was done by this point, and so during this time I was the skeptic, pointing out that all the evidence in favor of a reunion was circumstantial. Two band members talking regularly doesn’t mean anything will come of it. Maybe Wilson, Barbieri, and Harrison want control over their catalogue again; they have released a bunch of stuff on Bandcamp recently, after all. The guitar album for next year is obviously a solo effort. The website redesign was strictly for archival purposes, in tandem with the release of Footprints, an encyclopedic rundown of Wilson’s discography. And if “P/T” is Porcupine Tree, then “C/C” must be whoever they commissioned to remix some of their old stuff. This means nothing.
Boy, was I wrong. On November 1, we got a new song, and an announcement of a new album called Closure / Continuation in June and a European tour in the fall.
Harridan is a perfect example of what Todd Nathanson calls the “I’m back, bitch” single. It’s the lead single to a fresh album cycle, it sounds huge and bombastic, and it exists to show they still got it. This happens all the time in pop (Nathanson cites Michael Jackson’s Bad and the Black Eyed Peas’ Boom Boom Pow as examples), but it can also show up in other genres as well, especially when the artist returned from an extended hiatus like Porcupine Tree had (e.g. Pendulum’s Driver, Rammstein’s Deutschland, Tool’s Fear Inoculum, maybe even Devin Townsend’s Genesis).
This song’s raison d’être is clearly its own greatness. The lyrics mean nothing, and feel more like free-association poetry more than anything else. What the hell does “gold man bites down on a silver tongue” or “it’s the time of the almost rain without you / I am in debt to night” mean? Who cares? What’s important here is they’re back, just listen!
Instrumentally, the song is loud and uptempo, driving and pounding, a grandiose statement of purpose. This, though, is a double-edged sword, as Porcupine Tree’s selling point has always been its atmospherics and the way the song flows naturally. Songs like Harridan, of which Porcupine Tree has several in its discography, mostly B-sides and castoffs from In Absentia and Deadwing, generally feel like they’re being pushed forward as opposed to moving under their own power, and always feel a little forced and awkward as a result. As such, the best part of these songs are usually the instrumental break in the middle, and Harridan’s is no exception. There’s tense, burbling synths rising up and down like a sine wave, over which there’s a sparse, echoing, ominous guitar, and it sounds gorgeous.
Harridan does have one trick up its sleeve that saves it from becoming just another castoff, though. One danger that “I’m back, bitch” singles might fall into is Fear Inoculum Syndrome, where a band triumphantly returns after ten-plus years on hiatus and we discover that they have not evolved creatively or artistically at all in the time they’ve been gone. For as much as Harridan’s musculature is of a rejected Deadwing song blown up to eight minutes, there’s more to it than that. At the intro there’s Nick Beggs-esque bass that would fit right in on Hand Cannot Erase, the basic structure of the song sounds like something off To the Bone, and much of the electronic work sounds like stuff we’d hear on Love You to Bits or The Future Bites. There’s a clear sense of advancement here.
All that extra stuff is critical to the song’s success. In the press release for Closure / Continuation, the band had mentioned that Harridan had been knocking around on a hard drive for ten years, and one can understand why. If this were released right after the Incident album cycle in 2012, it would have sounded like a perfectly bog-standard late-era Porcupine Tree metal song, neither a refinement nor a clear path forward, evidence of the exact sort of stagnation that the band were determined to avoid throughout their career. No wonder Wilson wanted to write something like Raven instead. In 2021, though, with a fresh set of ears and a decade of musical evolution under everyone’s belt, it feels instead like a synthesis of what Porcupine Tree had produced before their hiatus (particularly that metal section after the second chorus), and what Steven Wilson has been doing in his solo career since. It doesn’t feel new the way, say, To the Bone or The Future Bites felt new, but it definitely feels newer than it could have been. Harridan is not the best song Porcupine Tree ever wrote or anything — everyone except possibly Harrison are well past their imperial phases at this point, so our standard for “good” is less “best ever” and more “varied and interesting” — but it is enough to get our attention for what’s to follow. I’ve listened to this song more often than anything else Wilson has released this year, and the first time I heard it I had a big stupid grin on my face.
The real question is what the rest of the album is going to sound like. Harridan can get away with sounding like a standard Porcupine Tree song with Steven Wilson solo elements stapled on because it dates from after the release of The Incident, and I’m not sure that’s something we can say for the other, newer songs on this album. Those will hopefully carry more influence from what Wilson, Barbieri, and Harrison have all done separately. I don’t want Closure / Continuation to sound like Fear of a Blank Planet II or The Incident II. If I wanted that, I’d just listen to Fear of a Blank Planet or The Incident. Porcupine Tree have successfully executed dramatic changes in their sound before, most prominently in the transition from Signify’s space rock to Stupid Dream’s alternative rock, and part of the reason the band broke up to begin with is Wilson’s belief that the music was ossifying instead of progressing. Basically, what I want out of Porcupine Tree after well over a decade apart is something that doesn’t sound like Porcupine Tree.
I have no idea if that’s what we’ll get with Closure / Continuation, nor do I know what, if anything, they’re going to do after this. The songs on this record silted into existence over the space of a decade. Wilson’s follow up to The Future Bites is supposed to be released in 2023, and there’s gonna be a whole year-plus promotion and touring cycle surrounding it. Maybe he’ll get to play in stadiums like he originally planned before the pandemic hit. Meanwhile, Barbieri has his solo career, and Harrison has his commitments with The Pineapple Thief and King Crimson. Prior to writing off the possibility of a Porcupine Tree reunion entirely, Wilson had said that it would strictly be as an occasional side project to the music he releases under his own name. If there is ever going to be a follow-up to Closure / Continuation, and there’s every reason to believe there won’t be one, it’s going to be a few years before we hear anything about it. For right now, though, there is cause for cautious optimism. Welcome back, guys.