METANOIA

The Signify period, which saw Porcupine Tree gelling further as a band (having been more of a Steven Wilson solo project prior to The Sky Moves Sideways), certainly yielded plenty of material beyond the studio album itself. As well as the Coma Divine live album from the tour and the Insignificance collection of studio off-cuts, it also provided us with Metanoia, a collection of live-in-the studio improvised jam sessions which the band indulged in.

Some of the material here would be picked up and used as the basis of more polished tracks - Intermediate Jesus on the Signify album had its backing track derived from an edit of one of these improvisations, for example - but most of this is unique to Metanoia, and all of it is offered in a rather different context.

If you like the more song-oriented side of Porcupine Tree, you won't find that here: what you will find is material remarkably like the sort of spacey, jazzy jams which the early 1970s krautrock scene was fond of turning out. If you like the spacier, less focused parts of On the Sunday of Life or Voyage 34, you're in the right sort of territory, though the Edwin/Maitland rhythm section adds a certain amount of drive to these jams not present in those earlier works which helps ensure that the release isn't just going over old ground.