“The Incident” feels like a lame accident
by Michael Skib
“I just want to be loved” is the message of progressive rock band Porcupine Tree’s new album. That unfortunate lyric is sung, over and over, in the album’s title track. Steven Wilson and his associates tried to please everyone in their fan base while concurrently expanding it, and the result was, unsurprisingly, this bland, passionless, thoroughly disappointing album.
Part of the disappointment stems from the fact that this album sounded so good on paper: a two disc, 75-minute affair, the first disc containing a 14 track song cycle in the vein of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” the second, four extra songs that were allegedly too good to not include. What a letdown it was to discover that the song cycle is simply not a mode in which Steven Wilson is capable of expressing himself; all of the album’s highlights are on the second disc. At four tracks, it disappears all too quickly, and feels much more like a bonus disc than an actual part of a cohesive album.
“The Incident” explores many different feels, textures and genres, but not in a way that is remotely interesting. They are poorly integrated parts of a whole; each feels more like an attempt to win somebody over, like that smarmy guy at the party who tries too hard to impress everyone.
Part of the problem is that the album lacks any sense of unity. The point of a song cycle is to create a group of songs that are meant to be played in order, one after another. For the most part these songs hardly acknowledge each other’s existence; you could completely rearrange the order of the songs, and there would be little change in the album’s overall effect.
When there are connections between songs, it is usually just a restatement of the same riff, which would be fine if the riffs themselves weren’t so boring. Instead of adding to thematic unity, it just feels like lazy songwriting.
It is worth noting that the order of songs presented on the album is the same order in which Steven Wilson wrote them, which makes me wonder if this is supposed to have a sort of stream of consciousness feel. If that is the case, it is still a failure; the whole song cycle is littered with ideas that never develop, immediately discarded as soon as the next one appears. There are too many confusing non-sequitors. Take Circle of Manias, for instance: an uncalled-for shout out to the band Meshuggah that begins after little transition, stops on a dime and immediately tosses the listener into the acoustic guitar driven melodrama of “I Drive the Hearse.” It only succeeds in being a baffling juxtaposition.
The anthemic pop tune “Drawing the Line,” with its lighthearted, dancy chorus, collides with the album’s title track, a mishmash of Nine Inch Nails elevator industrial and metal that was meant to be unsettling, but is no more than yawn-inducing. Eventually it gets bored with itself and the song reverts to pop mode, at which point Steven Wilson confesses from the deepest pit of his soul: “I just want to be loved.”
There is just as little thematic unity in the album’s lyrics. The theme is supposed to be based on the usage of the word “incident” in news coverage, and how impersonal it is to, for example, call an earthquake that kills 10,000 people in India an “incident.” As it turns out, however, Steven Wilson takes “incident” to mean “thing that happened to me.” The only song that isn’t about himself in some way is “The Blind House,” which instead boldly takes a stance against organized religion.
Steven Wilson has always been his own favorite lyrical subject, but this time his narcissism has gotten entirely out of control. He is trying to convince everybody that he is important; he wants everybody to remember him, because he believes that his story is worth hearing over and over.
The one bright spot on this album is the drumming, which is handled by Gavin Harrison. He has won “Best Progressive Drummer” in Modern Drummer magazine’s reader’s poll for three years straight. It may not be the most prestigious honor ever, but it is certainly deserved. His contributions almost make this album worth listening to; he has an excellent instinct for rhythm, keeping things interesting without being flashy or overbearing. Too bad everything else is so ineffective.
To be sure, part of the criticism is because Porcupine Tree has produced albums vastly superior to this one, and one can’t help but feel that Steven Wilson is phoning it in this time. He is capable of so much more than this soulless, schlocky mess.
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