IN ABSENTIA

Steven Wilson had long flirted with heavy metal sounds in Porcupine Tree's music. Around the turn of the century, he began to get more into extreme metal, including Meshuggah and Opeth. After being introduced to Opeth frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt, Wilson produced that band's 2001 album Blackwater Park. Around this same time, drummer Chris Maitland left the band and was replaced by Gavin Harrison, a more technical, metal-oriented drummer.

All these factors fed into the band's 2002 release, In Absentia. For all the metallic fury in the opening riff of "Blackest Eyes", In Absentia is not particularly metal on the whole. Heavy riffs do appear at various points on the album, but the bulk of the material here is pretty typical Porcupine Tree fare with a distorted veneer. It's an excellent album with some of their best material, but it was clearly a first step in Porcupine Tree's exploration of metallic ideas.

Aside from the aforementioned "Blackest Eyes", "Gravity Eyelids" features bruising walls of distortion in its second half, which are contrasted against Wilson's gentle vocal arrangements. The instrumental "Wedding Nails" features speedy, technical riffing and awkward, stuttering rhythms. Similar musical ideas are revisited on "The Creator Has a Mastertape", which almost sounds like the band's attempt to do a thrash metal song. "Strip the Soul", meanwhile, feels like Porcupine Tree-penned doom metal.

On the lighter end of things, "Trains" begins as a fantastic folk-flavored piece of prog-pop which builds in intensity until its final seconds. "Lips of Ashes" is a slow-moving, mostly-acoustic piece which uses its sparseness to brew a haunting atmosphere. Such simplicity is also deployed in the closing "Collapse the Light into Earth", a sorrowful piece featuring piano, Wilson's vocals, and strings.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/11/24/deep-dive-porcupine-tree-steven-wilson/