Porcupine Tree
Voyage 34: The Complete Trip

Not all Porcupine Tree albums are essential. This one is skippable, even for music lovers fond of Mr. Wilson's sound evolutions and his skilled bandmates.

This is a suite that was supposed to be part of the 1993 album "Up the Downstair." However, its thirty, prolix minutes of trance music clashed with the rest of the album's music, so the composition was released alone, structured in two parts, in an extended play in 1992. The following year, the productive Wilson decided to release an additional part, again in the extended single format, with another 30 minutes divided into two sections. In 2004, this 60-minute collection was finally released, containing all four segments.

The cover and title are already a whole program: pills spinning on a spiraled sky... We are in the presence of the soundtrack of a good acid trip, which started well and ended badly. To describe it musically, Steven relies on Porcupine's sole keyboardist Richard Barbieri and handles everything else himself, on the computer and instruments. This is in terms of execution, because speaking of inspiration, indeed true derivative support, there are strong doses of Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream.

Not a line of singing, all instrumental, flavored with ambient sounds as well as some spoken parts (not by him), according to the required ambient music clichés.

Steven Wilson is a highly skilled, indeed genius, omnivorous nerd musician, capable of deeply assimilating and splendidly regurgitating much of what rock has achieved from the seventies onwards. Listening to his works, one always oscillates between admiration for his undeniable compositional flair, perfect sound and mixing control, meticulous attention to detail, rational yet overwhelming passion for making music and offering it to enthusiasts, and the opposite disappointment for the consistent aftertaste of recycling, of past ideas not kept simply as inspiration, but rather re-clothed and re-chewed not enough to make them new.

Heck, the four-on-the-floor beat of Pink Floyd's "Run Like Hell," complete with a wandering solo guitar, is that! Who likes this stuff? Those intrigued by soundscapes, landscapes slowly evolving, the repetition of the same melodic/harmonic riff for long minutes. I could say the Brian Eno dependents, to understand each other. I don't mind this fluff... once in a while. Certainly, I don't feel the same passion as for "Time Flies" (from "The Incident," 2009), definitely not.