standby (looks like rain).

And it’s May. How did that happen?

I have what feels like an insanely busy month coming up. But more on that in the future.

I’ve had several good listens to Porcupine Tree’s new album, Fear of a Blank Planet, and my initial impressions are pretty good. I still think that they haven’t had a totally brilliant album since Stupid Dream in 1999, though their albums since then have had their awesome moments (”Trains,” anyone? fuck yeah!). But yeah…to keep this “review” short, since I tend to ramble when it comes to talking about music, my assessment of Fear of a Blank Planet is essentially that it’s really good, polished stuff, but nothing that I wouldn’t have expected from them. There’s not much to complain about here: the songwriting is top-notch, the production is even better than the last two records. Not many 18 minute songs that are supremely hummable, but that’s exactly what “Anesthetize” is. “Sleep Together” succeeds remarkably in making double suicide sound sexy in a Massive Attack-bass-groove-with-Kashmir-esque-string-orchestra kind of way.

My problem, if you can call it that, with this album is that it’s just nothing new. If anything, it’s a step further into that nouveau-prog-rock territory that Steve Wilson has been trying to avoid for years. He used to hate being compared to Dream Theater, but now here he is thrashing in drop C tuning over double kick drum beats in the manner of Mike Portnoy. It’s not nearly as over the top as that other band, but the one thing Fear of a Blank Planet lacks entirely is subtlety. It kicks the door in with its fast opening number and then beats you over the head continuously with its (bitingly sarcastic) first-person narratives of disaffected youth. We get it, Steven, you are not happy with the direction in which pop culture is leading Britain’s youth. The kids-with-staticky-TVs-instead-of-heads album artwork was clear enough. Another gorgeously harmonized chorus atop chugging power riffs, sweet.

Of course, that’s all a minor complaint. This is a great, polished album, I just have to be in the right mood to listen to it. Porcupine Tree is still one of my favorite bands, I’m just no longer obsessed with them. I can still hope they keep evolving, and eventually transcend that prog rock label that’s been sticking to their shoes every step of the way.

On another note, and it’s funny considering the amount of time I spent getting this site to function, I’m already getting tired of the light-blue-on-different-shades-of-grey color scheme here. Joan pointed out that it’s not exactly the most accessible color scheme, and I agree. The good thing about using WordPress as my CMS is that all I have to do change the look is to code another template. But I’m still burnt out from designing this one and the one for Shrub Oak Framing, and am gearing up to develop another full website for my old company, Character Studies. So who knows when I’ll get to making this site better looking. Maybe later in the summer?

And, I noticed this past week that the last.fm update thing stopped working. Curses! Maybe last.fm changed their feed syndication or something. Something I’ll have to look into when I have a few minutes free. Until then, toodles!

-D

Listening: Liquid Soul - Threadin’ the Needle