THE INCIDENT

After waiting for a long time, here it is... The Incident. The Incident is an ambitious project; a 55 minute long piece of music, divided in 14 seperate tracks. The album is about several Incidents, like a car crash, a cult in Texas and the discovery of a corpse floating in a river. These subjects where the inspiration for Steven Wilson to write this album; when you hear about a car crash, it sounds somewhat insignificant... but for the victims the impact is huge.

Now the music on the album, which is pretty variated. The album moves from Industrial sounding electronic pieces to softer and more pop like songs. The result is a somewhat inconsistent piece I think. Some songs are among Porcupine Tree's best, while some are very uninteresting. The style of the band hasn't progressed very much, but instead of that the band has combined muscial styles from their earlier albums into one... and it worked out pretty well. The sound is pretty tough to describe; it has some clear similarities with FOABP and early Porcupine Tree, and the sound varies from heavy, distorted riffs to psychedelic trip-hop parts.

The album has some very good songs on it, like The Blind House, Octane Twisted/The Seance and the epic Time Flies, which has an incredible instrumental middle part. The album also has much weaker songs, like the intro, which is repeated once after Time Flies, and the poppy Drawing The Line. Luckily, the majority of the music on the album is very good. The second disc is not very special I think... Bonnie the Cat is amazing, and Remember Me Lover is very good too, but the remaining two tracks leave me cold.

In the end I think The Incident isn't Porcupine Tree's best, but it for sure isn't bad. I think the album deserves three or four stars, but I tend to lean towards three stars, so that's what I rate it. A somewhat inconsistant, but ambitious and overall innovative piece of music.