If I had to describe this entry in a word, that word would be "nocut".
3. Porcupine Tree - Fear of a Blank Planet
Not necessarily for the casual listener, Porcupine Tree's latest album has quite the array of loud guitars, soft guitars, keyboard antics, and just a smidge of clinical insanity. All of this is condensed into only six tracks, although one of those tracks is nearly eighteen minutes long and all of them run longer than one and a half top 40 hits. Aside from the seventeen and a half minute monster "Anesthetize", none of the songs feel long though, and even "Anesthetize" is broken up into three distinct movements, all of which do not drag, providing the album's loudest moments in one movement and then transitioning to something much softer and experimental. Funnily enough the shortest song "My Ashes" is the one that feels a bit slow, but that may be perhaps because it is simply a slow song. It kind of throws you off a bit when you first hear it, as any song called "My Ashes" would undoubtedly do.
However the album sounds great from start to finish. This is not an album that you can listen to once, as is the case with other Porcupine Tree albums, because the second listen of
Fear of a Blank Planet will bowl you over much more than the first one will. I have no idea how they accomplish that. Perhaps it has something to do with the vocals, which do not leap out of the speakers and grab you, nor do they haunt you and tease you into listening more, they merely insert themselves into the mix as an enhancement - vocals are not present for a great deal of the album, which is fairly unusual given that no tracks are wholly instrumental.
With most bands, when you read the lyrics while you listen, you get a new found appreciation for what you are listening to, but with
Fear of a Blank Planet, this appreciation will be even higher than usual. The lyrics focus mainly on (a) disaffected youth of some sort, with several references to pills, ones that presumably have more negative side effects than positive results, or maybe the pills are a metaphor. Most of their material can be construed metaphorically with several acres worth of wiggle room for interpretation.
The title track is one of my favorite songs of the decade, because it showcases all of the band's talents and sounds better than anything else I have heard from the band, although they do have many songs of similar greatness and I would not necessarily call it my favorite, it sounds the best. "Fear of a Blank Planet" (the song) engulfs and entices your ears without beating them to death, and it is what I would call a Porcupine Tree signature song. Even though the band is next to impossible to describe in one sentence, I would recommend listening to it if you wanted to know what they sound like, because it has all of their best sounds. Although I can not speak enough good about that one track, the album as a whole does have a fantastic sound as well. It may not hook everyone, but to those that it does hook, it will astound.
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