PURE NARCOTIC

This is a great single if you can find it. I was lucky and found it used at Zia Records in AZ. If you are lucky enough to have the STUPID DREAM album, which can't be found right now, then you've heard PURE NARCOTIC and TINTO BRASS. PURE NARCOTIC is a wonderful light number with good lyrics. These are great PT stuff. Along with those you get the 4:25 min. DOOR TO THE RIVER which is a nice, mellow, spacey, ambient piece of instrumental music with the great guitar work of Steven Wilson with some nice light drums, synth, and some wind chime type effects. The single also has a live version of TINTO BRASS an upbeat semi-heavy instrumental with some Asian woman's voice sampled on it along with a telephone busy signal, as with any live PT recording it's practically flawless, and hard to tell it wasn't studio produced. Cool song also. Buy it if you think it's worth it for DOOR TO THE RIVER. Great cover art too!

ANOTHER SHORTY

This is one of the 3 singles from the album STUPID DREAM, being the other 2 : Stranger By The Minute and Piano Lessons. This one is a bit better (IMO) than Stranger.. only because i think the 2 songs chosen from SD in this cd are better than the 2 on the other single. Unfortunately i can't compare with Piano Lessons sgl. since i don't have it.

"Pure Narcotic" is a nice mellow song with the characteristic of sound of PT on this kind of songs. Great song but shorter than the original. The version of "Tinto Brass" is a live track with the classic sharp sound of PT in stage, and Wilson makes his guitar sing intsead of him (if you know what i mean). Excellent song. "Door to The River" is an instrumental from their cd METANOIA, one of the most experimental albums in PT's catalog, but this song is probably one of the easiest to 'digest' from that release.

For me is a very good single, but is very difficult for me giving more than 3 or 3.5 stars because it has only 3 songs which makes it too short and giving it 4 would put it in the level of other great PT albums and it's not the case.

Porcupine Tree - 'Pure Narcotic (single)' 2 stars

The music is good, but only fans would want to purchase this.

'Pure Narcotic' is just an edited down version of the original on 'Stupid Dream'.

'Tinto Brass' however, is a different animal. The live version of the track bares little resemblance to the original. It is more of Tinto Brass, mixed with the improv from 'Metanoia'. The notable chorus ends the track though.

'Door to the River' is from the 'Metanoia' sessions. It isn't a very good piece, just spacey psychedelic improv.

This is a very short EP. I could not possibly recommend it to anyone but a serious fan of the band. 2 stars give due to an extreme lack of material and some of the material not being worthy. Specifically, because of an edit to the not so long piece 'Pure Narcotic' and the boring 'Door to the River'.

For just being a single, "Pure Narcotic" isn't that bad. With that, I mean that the three songs that are here present are n't bad, even though some are better than others.

This single was released just before "Stupid Dream" came out. In fact, two of the three songs come from the album. The title track, "Pure Narcotic" , is maybe even better than the original one, even though it's shorter, and the live version of "Tinto Brass" is very well recorded, and it's almost able to compete with the original version. "Door To The River" is a very unique and interesting piece, the obscure and experimental song that was never released in an album and never had any success.

The single, to conclude, was very enjoyable, and definitely well worth the, although little, time.

This PURE NARCOTIC single is primarily valuable for established fans, although the primary purpose of a single is to draw in radio listeners new to the band. Although PT puts out uniformly interesting releases, this isn't where I'd turn first. If you're on Prog Archives and you've bothered to search for this single, I'm going to assume you're probably familiar with PT.

The two tracks from STUPID DREAM are good, but not the best from the full album. I'm not a big fan of "Tinto Brass", but Steven's guitar solo is terrific. The third track, "Door to the River" from METANOIA, is nice; it's more of an ambient experiment than an actual song. If you're new to the band or STUPID DREAM, I don't think this is a particularly representative example of what the band does. I would start with a different single or EP.