METANOIA

Porcupine Tree, active for already 17 years, have become - in a graduate way - the band with many faces, with enough potential to squeeze one of the best expressions of new prog rock ever, still never forgetting to attract many fans, since their music always boils perfect pitches with blank commercial ideas and modern art with impulsive rock standards. Though you can't blame much of the changes, and in fact each large phase (three, so far) came with an essential or at least close to perfect work, there are still enough words for evoking the loss of the psychedelic flair, after the mid-90s, upon the embrace of alternative and pop, towards the end of 90s and the following aforementioned boil of great and bit dubious stuff during these new successful times. I was never personally convinced and fully content with post-Signify albums like Stupid Dream or Lightbulb Sun, but I'm even more disappointed that, since talking about the PT's eclecticism, one of the band's faces is kinda left out of the equation, most of the time. And the masterwork of this split side, suffering the most, is Metanoia.

Snapping out of this hard (and empty, in places) critic to Porcupine Tree's half portion of less artistic and less profound music, but purely ecstatic, heart-shaking, melding the progressive with the mainstream, it's more important to recommend this different, more unknown, bit surreal, unexpected, challenging, difficult to get into or retain achievement. What's true is true, it can't compare in any way with Porcupine Tree's main line of projects, with the big albums that is, but even considering this, it sounds like a great moment when fantasy took over, instrumentality was more perfectioned (ending a bit too rough, sometimes), it's not something greatly unusual coming from them, though it could be annexed inside the "alternative" directions. Being perceived against all the common tendencies doesn't make it bad, unrecompensed. And, since it's just a sort of "side-album", comported as an extra experiment, it's not even style-shifting Porcupine Tree's main glow, since, considering it a 2001, it's strictly an album placed between PT's line of easy, modern-pop music (culminating with Lightbulb Sun) and new shift (starting with In Absentia). It's much harder to accept, for me, the fact that we can talk about Metanoia being marginalized, just like the Voyage 34 re-installed story one year ago. Distaste is one thing, preference is another, but treating the album as, let's assume, "not of a PT worth" is just sad. Still, overall, the hard way how Metanoia is received enhances even more, IMO, its special nature.

Since it is originally a 1998 project and a Signify special session, things aren't so insufferable, neither that radical. Released only in 2001, it has a good place there, as a crossover effect of new endorsed music, lately imagined subtlety, vainly crisped shadiness.

Metanoia is able to passionate and intrigue, under constant fret. I found it to be splendid in a juvenile period when Porcupine Tree didn't clicked to me so much, and still is, nowadays, of a penetrating fervor, of a fantastic difficulty, so that it doesn't matter what kind of common music Porcupine Tree does best, it matters that this different and curiously unwanted side-project is above expectations. What we can hear is a fruitful game of dark, charliehorsed, unstable music; overall the band practices nothing more apart than an improvising and glowing space hard rock. It's also a serious training into heavy listening, one dense piece following another, the caliber being thick, changes whirpooling, the effervescence being somber, suffocating, the style being more of an underground flavor, the dynamics being obsessive. Nuances are like nerves, glitches or thunders, there's little melody and harmony to be taken in a simple way, the album practically attacks your cerebral sense for metallic, demonic, gloomy music, through stirring and susceptibly lush effects. It's up to you whether you like it or not, the hard, dark catharsis that's build is all there. Conventionally, this could go a bit lower, seen as a regular session of heavy instrumental rock which to blacken the same mind we've talked about earlier and which to build your affection based on hollow structures. Still, the music's strong, the vigor's push is towards illusion and dizziness; the soundproof is excellent. Somehow, Porcupine Tree's hard improvised rock session makes me think of King Crimson's THRaKaTTaK, a similar un-commercial, un-conventional, un-controllable work.

Metanoia, in terms of going overboard and try to huff its essence, could also be a stunning ode to purely instrumental, free-guided rock. Complex, calibrated or just full of ornaments, this is modern and luscious, with artistic, demonic, capricious elements coming out of all its heavy-sounding great prose.