No-Man
Schoolyard Ghosts

Frugality has become a hallmark for many artists in the music industry. After all, market saturation demands this choice and renders mindless hyperactivity unnecessary, if not harmful. However, as with every rule, there are exceptions. Steven Wilson is an exception.

For quite some time now, he has headed the band Porcupine Tree—with whom he has released a dozen albums. Over the years, he has invented a couple of side projects to give free rein to his artistic ego, which seemed to be confined to too narrow a space at the main house. Together with Israeli artist Aviv Geffen, he founded Blackfield, who, despite their dark name, deliver rather conventional pop-rock—a classy easy-listening, if you will—successfully releasing a couple of decently respectable albums, although very academic.

Much more significant is the No-Man project created with vocalist Tim Bowness, running since 1993, wherein they took just a year to release their masterpiece, the unrivaled "Flowermouth," capable of presenting an overreaching yet solidly ambitious music with a broad scope, giving a soul and a beating heart to the cold techno-dance rhythms and not shying away from touching on prog territories. They haven't been able to replicate that level again, though subsequent albums, despite ups and downs, have always distinguished themselves by an aesthetically refined pursuit of sounds, even though they add nothing to what was initially stated, eventually lapsing into the hollow frenzy of "Together We're Stranger" from five years ago, the duo's last effort. The album shifted towards the border of ambient, slow-core, and chill-out, pushing the sounds already present in previous works to extremes and ultimately resulting in a project that was merely lengthy and tedious, to put it mildly. Having run out of steam, Steven Wilson took a five-year period of reflection before returning today with this "Schoolyard Ghosts," the couple's sixth album.

Midway across, they would have asked themselves whether to continue on the ambient path to become modern-day heirs of the likes of Eno, Budd, and Hassel, offering a music of great appeal but fundamentally self-contained and appealing only to enthusiasts of the genre, or to backtrack slightly to recover some lost ground and reintroduce elements that vaguely reference traditional song structures, albeit with all necessary distinctions.

A dark but not gloomy work, slow but not lazy, minimal but not whiny. Soft piano lines accompanied by mellotron, keyboards, and strings, almost always supported by a rather subdued rhythm section, let Tim Bowness's voice filter through to paint sparse autumnal scenes in strict black and white. Stretched and ethereal pieces marked by shadowy, stealthy steps unfold seamlessly. Eight tracks over a total of fifty-three minutes bring the duo back to a more canonical musical structure tout-court, without, however, leaving out ambient atmospheres which evidently belong to their DNA. Completely removed are the baroque ambitions, a hallmark of their beginnings, and which are eventually developed and elaborated by the main house, Porcupine Tree. The duo has embarked on a very intriguing but somewhat introspective and personal path, which, if it doesn't mark setbacks, struggles quite a bit to show glimpses of light on the horizon, sketching a bradycardic status quo.

Noteworthy is the very luxurious and meticulously crafted packaging, where a normal CD is accompanied by a DVD that, besides replaying the album in dolby surround, offers the buyer three video tracks. Ultimately, a record that will not disappoint their fans but, I fear, will hardly attract any new ones.