IN ABSENTIA

On In Absentia, their first album for Lava/Atlantic, the forboding and fear of Porcupine Tree's previous work manifests itself in a bleak album filled with killers and lonliness. This album is the audio equivlent to mind bending cinematic terror studies like Saw and 7even, conveyed with crunching guitars and unsettling keyboards. Clearly influenced by his production work with Opeth, Steven Wilson's occasional obsession with the morbid dominates this work. The opening "Blackest Eyes", a rocker with a narrator who thinks "its so erotic/when your makeup runs," contains pounding instrumental sections and a creepily jovial vocal melody. The band not only approaches death metal on the heavy scale, but is more rhythmically precise, courtesy of new drummer Gavin Harrison. The album then takes you on a whrilwind tour through the catchy acoustics of "Trains," the paranoid minimalism of "Lips of Ashes," the stuttering rant of a single that is "Sound of Muzak" and the monolithic epic "Gravity Eyelids." Beginning with a lo-fi drum loop and building gradually to a rocking climax, the song is utterly apocalyptic in concert. "Prodigal" is a piece of lethargic britpop with a brilliant twist in the lyrics. After being introduced to the narrator, the listner gradually comes to the realisation that the friends he talks about are characters he watches on TV. The album is at its best on the last three songs, a triptych of such unrelenting black and grey colors that the impose claustrophobic atmosphere on the rest of the album. "Heartattack in a Layby" is a mellow, echoe drenched story of a man driving home to say sorry and instead succombing to death alone at a rest stop. "Strip the Soul" is a ragged and heavy song about murder and abuse, culminating in the two note guitar figure in the bridge section over which Wilson sings "this machine/is built to please/strip the soul/fill the hole/a fire to feed/a belt to bleed/strip the soul/kill them all." The coda to this album is a piano and string elegy, "Collapse the Light Into Earth." The string section is arranged skillfully by ex XTC keyboardist David Gregory (who curiously left XTC because of his reluctance to work with orchestration on their late-90s classic Apple Venus pt 1) and eventually all fades out but the mournful strings before they turn to silence too. Although not equalling the heartfelt emotion of their previous work, Lightbulb Sun, it is another strong and masterwork from these modern prog legends Porcupine Tree.