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Due to Steven preparing a remaster of this album, it's currently the only Porcupine Tree album that's not on Spotify as of this writing. As a substitute, there are YouTube links to each of the songs on the album.
Porcupine Tree’s ninth studio album opted to go for another concept album. The resulting album (Fear of a Blank Planet) has a rather complicated history with the band because it’s one of the few times that additional material was released as a separate product: the Nil Recurring EP (also 2007). The four songs found on Nil Recurring were originally slated to appear on Fear of a Blank Planet, but were removed because Steven found trouble fitting them into the album’s concept.
The concept itself touches upon a wide range of topics that can affect modern teenagers. Such topics include technology, desensitization, prescription drugs, anxiety, depression, suicide attempts, alienation, antisocial behavior, and feeling like they’re unable to discover what the world’s about. As such, some critics have claimed that Fear of a Blank Planet has become more relevant now than when the album debuted in 2007.
That concept involves three perspectives—all of which are modern teenagers and the lyrics of which are filtered through their perspectives. This means that Steven—who was close to 40 at the time of the album’s release—wrote all of this album’s lyrics, a fact that has proven divisive. As such, Fear of a Blank Planet has been considered by some to mark a unique lyrical approach that works better than expected and by others to have the worst lyrics that Steven Wilson’s ever written. I’m more middle-of-the-road because while some of these lyrics can come across as trying too hard to capture the ‘teenage’ mindset (inevitable when being written by an adult), they always have the densely-packed analysis-prone quality which has characterized Steven’s lyrics from the start.
The structure of the three perspectives constitutes three paths through the album’s six tracks. Path 1 involves the overview title track. Path 3 occupies “Anesthetize,” the album’s 17-minute suite-like centerpiece which marks an album highlight. Path 2 traces a straight line through the remaining four tracks: “My Ashes,” “Sentimental,” “Way Out of Here,” and “Sleep Together” (dirty minds, that song title isn’t what you think it is).
Regarding the music contained on the album, Fear of a Blank Planet features the second-strongest set of songs in the band’s catalog (behind only In Absentia). Part of that’s due to the playing and vocals, some of which are the most varied yet. While the crushing guitar riffs of songs like the title track, “Anesthetize,” and “Way Out of Here” make a strong case for Fear of a Blank Planet being the heaviest Porcupine Tree album, moments like “My Ashes” and “Sentimental” are sublimely melancholic. Yet “Sleep Together” verges into uncharted territory for the band: Nine Inch Nails-inspired industrial music blended with PT’s signature sound.
As for the instrumentation, the first people who deserve mention are Colin Edwin on bass and Steven Wilson on guitar. Both of which contribute wildly to how heavy Fear of a Blank Planet can become at times, but at the heavier moments it can seem like Colin’s drowned out by the barrage of guitar. A shame because Colin’s playing’s as strong as it’s ever been. Steven’s guitar work runs the gamut from the acoustic and electric riffs peppered throughout the title track, the folk-like acoustic chords of “My Ashes,” the array of riffs/melodies/solos in “Anesthetize” (which have influences traceable to Radiohead, Meshuggah, and Pink Floyd), the flanging pattern which pops up mid-way through “Sentimental,” the blending of ambient acoustic picking and violent-sounding electric guitar riffs in “Way Out of Here,” and the simple chords which imbue the chorus of “Sleep Together” with a sound as blackened and raw as the nilhistic lyrics.
Richard Barbieri’s war-chest of keyboards and synths play just as vital of a role on Fear of a Blank Planet as they did on Deadwing, but in a different capacity. Whereas the atmosphere of Deadwing was eerie at times, it was full of life in others. For Fear of a Blank Planet, melancholy often serves as the only sign of emotional life and that’s the express territory of Richard. Sure, other instruments and Steven’s voice can add to and galvanize that feeling of melancholy. But the root of that melancholy in the music comes from Richard’s keyboards, making them carry a more crucial component in Porcupine Tree than ever before. Because with the topics discussed in Steven’s lyrics for this album, there’s no way to cover them except with melancholy. It’s no exaggeration to say that without Richard, the entire album would fall apart.
Lastly comes Gavin Harrison on drums, who offers on Fear of a Blank Planet what many consider the greatest all-around display of his talents. Whether it's the straight-away 6/4 hard-rock beats of the title track, the basic bits of ride cymbal which add color to “My Ashes,” the 15/16 time signature of the first couple of minutes of “Sentimental,” the lurching industrial rhythms of “Sleep Together,” or the ability to make every technical bit of “Anesthetize” and “Way Out of Here” feel second-nature, Gavin displays a mastery of feel in several different forms of drumming. Even compared to his performances on In Absentia and Deadwing, Gavin steps up his game for Fear of a Blank Planet and awards tended to agree. Speaking of awards (and to give an idea of how good Gavin’s drumming on this album is), Modern Drummer magazine had a reader's poll for “best progressive drummer of the year” and Gavin Harrison won that poll despite stiff competition from albums released in 2007 featuring Neil Peart (Rush; Snakes and Arrows) and Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater; Systematic Chaos), two drummers that are no strangers to greatest drummers of all-time lists.
Overall, Fear of a Blank Planet constitutes some of the strongest material in the Porcupine Tree discography. It’s also the rare album that—like a fine wine—has improved and become more relevant with age. But that relevancy also makes this album hit raw nerves moreso than most of the band’s albums. While In Absentia isn’t an album where listeners relate to the killer/rapist protagonist of that album (and if you do, that speaks volumes about you), Fear of a Blank Planet reveals itself a different beast. Different in that the lyrical concerns of mental illness, the dangers of technology, and desensitization are all-too-real in ways which have only become more pronounced since 2007.
“Fear of a Blank Planet” (7:28)
The album’s title track—an overview of the album’s core concepts and themes—was picked as one of two singles from Fear of a Blank Planet. In my mind, that’s an odd choice since not only does the track clock in at seven-and-a-half minutes, but much of that duration is loaded with pummeling heavy metal guitars that would scare any. My guess is that Steven picked it as a single for two reasons. The first being that it’s Steven kissing up to their new record label (Roadrunner, a label specializing in metal that’s a subsidiary of a major label), even if that’s inconsistent with the sentiments of songs like “Dark Matter,” “Four Chords That Made A Million,” and “The Sound of Muzak” (although Walt Whitman would take me to task on ‘consistency’). The second being that despite the aggressive sound, the title track comes across as one of Porcupine Tree’s catchiest ‘heavy’ songs along with “Blackest Eyes,” “Shallow,” “Halo,” and “Open Car.”
Considering that, it’s not much of a surprise that (with an edited five-minute version) a music video was shot for this track. While the music videos normally aren’t worth mentioning in these analyses, this one (along with that of the album’s other single, “Way Out of Here”) are—albeit for different reasons. This music video almost got Steven and company into some trouble because at one point, it shows a teenage boy laying out various types of guns on a table—a thematically-appropriate image given that the act of a school shooting is partly due to the feeling of insignificance brought about by insecurities, bullying, mental illness, and a warped sense of entitlement (and partly due to inadequate gun control, but that’s another topic altogether). Like I said way back in my “Dark Matter” analysis (back in my Signify review), that song had as a line “The media circus will make you a star.” When I looked at that line in a 2018 context, it highlights why some folks posit that reportage of mass shootings should omit the names of the shooter(s): without a “media circus,” there’s no way for any significance (martyrdom or otherwise) to come about through acts of domestic terrorism.
Another note regarding the imagery of guns in the music video for “Fear of a Blank Planet” is that—in a remarkable case of bad timing which Steven couldn’t have predicted—the video was uploaded on the same morning (April 16th, 2017) a few hours prior to the Virginia Tech shooting. That shooting was the deadliest mass shooting in US history until the Pulse nightclub shooting in June 2016 and the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017. For obvious reasons, Steven pulled the video ASAP, but (for unknown reasons that could be pressure from the record label) it was re-uploaded later in 2007.
Before diving in, one should ask what does the ‘blank planet’ mean since that image proved important enough to become the name of the album. Simply put, that image serves as a metaphor for social processes which end up stripping meaning from the lives of young people. The image also relates to the emotional state of teens and how—throughout this album—emotions are deemed a crutch that one should suppress, but that process only bottles things up. The relation to prescription medication demands the context of the rigorous testing system for UK students circa 2007. The ties between the two constitute a condemnatory effect of the over-competitive spirit capitalism that facilitates the problems to begin with. By doing so, the album suggests that if the condition of youth has become pathologized, it's a reaction to what the society that the previous generation shaped had driven the youth to appear as. At the time of the album's release, adult fear of youth measured higher in the UK than in other EU countries. To the point where British adults were found to be less likely to break up anti-social behavior being committed by teenagers. This culture of fear's vital towards understanding the album since themes of restraint are the direct result of the politicians perpetuating the culture of fear being the same people who are afraid.
All that background information preps listeners for lyrical analysis. Steven comes into the song close to a minute in, but the first couple of revolutions of lyrics which Steven delivers in the first verse paint a clear picture at the priorities of this teen:
Sunlight coming through the haze.
No gaps in the blinds
To let it inside.
The bed is unmade,
Some music still plays.
TV, yeah it’s always on.
The flicker on the screen,
A movie actress screams,
I’m basking in the shit flowing out of it.
In some cases, how Steven delivers these lines informs their meaning. In this instance, the rapid-fire delivery of these lines reflects how overwhelming everything is to the album's speaker. But as for what’s actually said, there’s a scene being set perfectly by these opening lines. But then there’s the details like the unnatural and blurry quality evoked by “haze” and the isolation entailed from “No gaps in the blinds.” Where things get really interesting comes from the last four lines: “TV, yeah it’s always on./The flicker on the screen,/A movie actress screams,/I’m basking in the shit flowing out of it.” Those four lines illustrate a means of escape (the TV), shows how the speaker indulges in sensationalism (the screaming movie actress), and create a contradiction in that he criticizes the culture as “shit” yet he basks in it.
One could attempt to resolve the contradiction by stating that calling the culture “shit” constitutes Steven’s own voice invading the narrative for a split-second, but I disagree. Having been an edgy teenager, that’s about the time that swear words tend to be introduced into a person’s vocabulary in the schoolyards, so they tend to relish in it. A simple word like “shit” being used gratuitously fits the voice of a troubled teenager better than it fits Steven’s (in the albums up to this point, the one use of “fuck” in the full version of “Even Less” marks Steven’s only use of strong profanity). The contradiction itself has an unnerving effect if one chooses to see that the empty culture that the speaker’s placed in has a ‘watching a trainwreck’ quality. Unnerving because that means that the speaker’s fully aware of the hollowness of the Blank Planet yet remains powerless to defy it, so he may as well put on a fake smile.
The second half of the first verse adds further layers to how screwed-up this teen has become in the society of the Blank Planet:
I’m stoned in the mall again.
Terminally bored,
Shuffling round the stores,
And shoplifting is getting so last year’s thing.
The display of rebellious and illegal behaviors described here as ascribable to being “Terminally bored” can come across as a moment where Steven seems out-of-touch with the experience of a modern teenager. But in doing so, what he suggests by these lines are supported by factual evidence compiled and made public in Britain around the time of the album’s release. This evidence is inextricably linked to the fact that—as far as the aspects of commodification inherent in capitalism—Britain had progressed the furthest out of the EU nations long before 2007. The evidence comes in the form of a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (a British progressive think-tank) which found that (in 2006/07) 44% of British youth had participated in a fight compared to 28% in Germany, 36% in France, and 38% in Italy. While fighting isn’t mentioned in these lines, they fall under the same umbrella as being “stoned in the mall” and “shoplifting.”
That study also factors into the fact that—earlier in the same decade—the British government at the time initiated a counter-action against such rebellion. Which came in the form of surveys sent to schoolchildren in public schools. These surveys not only forced students to self-report on their drinking habits, but to spill the beans on their own parents regarding improper child rearing. I say ‘forced’ because defiance (which comes understandably since this case involves an invasion of privacy) resulted in being forcibly sent to ‘behavior management.’ That doesn’t sound so bad, but there are frightening implications regarding mental illness, the diagnosis of such, and government power in that action. That action implies that the status of diagnosing people with conditions such as bipolar disorder (which this song later refers to by name), ADHD, autism, depression, etc., are used by those in power to control kids who can’t conform to the society of the Blank Planet. In this regard, individuality becomes synonymous with mental illness. For the record, Steven’s not invalidating anyone who actually has such conditions. He just points out how the terminology and the names of such conditions can be used as a weapon by those in power, something which the context of the political climate of Britain in 2007 supports.
All of that undertaken to curb activities like being “stoned in the mall” and “shoplifting.” That pushback can very well be the reason why the latter is “getting so last year’s thing,” which connotes that the speaker’s aware that what gives him a feeling of being alive remains frowned in the public eye. The problem with such a pushback—suggested by the fact that “shoplifting is getting so last year’s thing”—remains that through a short-sightedness by the government, they didn’t take care the root of the problem (the society of the Blank Planet). As a result, two things are guaranteed: that other forms of rebellion will come about and that those forms will gradually escalate in extremity, making the problem worse. In that sense, Steven’s word choice of “Terminally bored” proves apt in that it foreshadows the most extreme repudiation of the society of the Blank Planet: suicide. But that’s a topic to be addressed in the last two songs on Fear of a Blank Planet.
The last four lines of the first verse stress another component of the Blank Planet:
My Xbox is a god to me.
A finger on the switch,
My mother is a bitch,
My father gave up ever trying to talk to me.
The name-dropping of a gaming console (probably the Xbox 360 since that launched in 2005) by comparing it to “a god” functions on a few levels. First, the line smacks of the type of arrogance so removed from Steven’s personality that it firmly places the listener in the mind of the speaker. Secondly, video games can easily serve as an objective correlative for the hollow materialism of the society of the Blank Planet. Thirdly, it fits snugly into the theme of technology desensitizing the youth. For what it’s worth, Steven did change his tune on video games slightly in recent times—even lending remixes of his music to serve as the soundtrack to the 2016 story-driven game “Last Day In June” (a process in which he was invited by the developers to witness the finished game being played). Admittedly, Steven’s (as of this writing) fifty years old and his hardline focus on music probably kept him out of the loop on how far video games have evolved since the days of the Atari 2600 and NES, so his surprise is more than understandable. Steven’s more-enlightened perspective on video games aside, this line registers effectively on the culture surrounding the speaker.
One element of that culture which provides vital context on the harshness of the lines “A finger on the switch,/My mother is a bitch,/My father gave up ever trying to talk to me.” Sure, the fact that the speaker can simply tune out humans by placing “A finger on the switch” speaks volumes about the dehumanizing effect of technology, but there’s something else at play which demands factual evidence. That something comes from the fact that (circa 2007) full-time employment (for both parents) in the UK had the longest hours of any EU nation and had longer hours than 1970’s parents. Which results in British parents having no time to properly raise children, something supported by The Guardian’s 2004 poll stating that 61% of parents spent too much time at work. Understandably, a dynamic where parents hardly know their children places strain on that bond. However, the long-hours culture also applies to children’s academics. In a sense, school does prepare you for life, but by indoctrinating the children towards perpetuating the capitalist state of the Blank Planet.
After a leap into the heaviest riff of the song so far immediately following Steven’s utterance of “My father gave up ever trying to talk to me,” that riff carries over into the second verse. While shorter than the first verse, it’s still densely-packed and has a lot to say in eight lines (which I’ve split into two parts):
Don’t try engaging me.
The vaguest of shrugs.
The prescription drugs.
You’ll never find a person inside.
One way to read this first line—“Don’t try engaging me”—involves the speaker lashing out at those who engage him because he’s aware of their compliance towards the Blank Planet. Perhaps that lashing out’s only an interior monologue. However, there’s helpful context regarding the school system of England circa 2007. This was a time where primary school (the UK version of grade school) bombarded students with tests at a rate that rendered England the world's most over-tested nation at the primary school level. One 2000 study found that the stress of the British testing system induced headaches, sicknesses, and depression in students. Steven's lyrics illustrate a common trend among parents of children in such an environment—prescribe their kids with medications like Ritalin to keep their concentration in peak-form for the tests.
That context provides another reason why the speaker asks everyone not to engage him—the pressure of academic success. A side-effect of which gets implied in “The vaguest of shrugs.” That side-effect’s the suppression of human emotions. This ties into the bottled-up effect that only ends in disaster. The type of disaster that leads one to think that children are more uncontrollable than ever. While the Blank Planet believes that, the fact that an amphetamine-level drug like Ritalin or Prozac is used to keep behavior under control suggests a society that's frightened of the consequences of rebellion. That some parents opt for putting their kids on such drugs to gain an edge in the test-race shows that adults were warped by the Blank Planet’s capitalist underpinnings.
The last line—“You’ll never find a person inside”—relates all that to dehumanization and a lack of personality. This lack of personality fits snugly with “The prescription drugs” since they have a cause-and-effect relationship. The takeaway being that the administration of “The prescription drugs” serves as a form of restraint. As to what’s restrained, that’s sketched out by the rebellious acts of the “I’m stoned…year’s thing” lines. What matters is that while resistance allows a youth to express his/her/their self, it also creates further stigmatization in the eyes of authority figures. Meaning that there’s no way for a teenager (in this album) to be themselves and fulfilled.
The second half of the second verse deepens the conundrum:
My face is Mogadon.
Curiosity has given up on me.
I’m tuning out desires.
The pills are on the rise.
There is a specific drug referenced in the line “My face is Mogadon,” which is another name for Nitrazepam, a drug which is used for several purposes which are relevant to the concerns of the character of Fear of a Blank Planet. As medical use, the drug’s used to treat insomnia and epilepsy as well as an anti-anxiety medication. A couple of the more common side-effects are also relevant towards Fear of a Blank Planet. Namely those of depressed mood, dizziness, decreased physical performance, numbed emotions, inattention, and somnolence.
Back to the song, the phrases “Curiosity has given up on me” and “I’m tuning out desires” factors into similar concepts. The keywords are “curiosity, “desires,” “given up,” and “tuning out.” The first two—“curiosity” and “desires”—outline two aspects of human nature: impulsivity and the need for independent discovery. One can easily link both towards an expression of rebellion against the society of the Blank Planet. Which leads into what the latter two keywords—“given up” and “tuning out”—entail. Both phrases suggest that the prescription drugs (when used to restrain) suppress human nature. And in both wordings, it’s clear that the speaker’s suppression isn’t voluntary. That leaves me feeling like there’s a Foucaultian power-based reading to this entire song. Which is a notion supported by the real-life context of government oppression.
The last line of the verse—“The pills are on the rise”—is, on one level, a blanket statement. Albeit one summarizing all of this verse’s points into one line. However, this line can also involve Steven’s voice breaking into the narrative. In doing so, it’s both a temporary break from the speaker’s perspective and a statement from Steven to make sure one gets the point. Not very subtle, but many folks won’t pick up on the context behind much of the preceding lines, so maybe that lack of subtlety is needed. That doesn’t mean that Steven thinks non-British people are idiots. Just that he recognizes that the intersection between prescription drugs and primary school academia in the UK in around 2005-2007 is a highly narrow context which should be broadened out.
Once Steven finishes singing “The pills are on the rise,” the song shifts into the chorus without skipping a beat:
How can I be sure I’m here?
The pills that I’ve been taking confuse me.
I need to know that someone sees that
There’s nothing left, I simply am not here.
Of all the ways that this chorus can be read, it should not be anthemic. Right from the question of “How can I be sure I’m here?,” there’s a pervading sense of numbness in this chorus that’ll recur in “Anesthetize.” While on the topic of “Anesthetize,” the last five words of this chorus—“I simply am not here”—are the first five in that of the first movement of “Anesthetize.” In both instances, emotional numbness from the pills result in an erosion of identity due to an inability to express oneself without fear of stigmatization. That’s why “The pills that I’ve been taking confuse me.”
In regards to the question of “How can I be sure I’m here?” and what it means, there’s an internal/external divide which the pills exacerbate. That struggle factors into the first line of “Anesthetize”: “A good impression of myself.” I’ll truly unravel that union of a line in “Anesthetize,” but the relation to “Fear of a Blank Planet” comes from an impression being synonymous with fakery. This relates to the internal/external divide of “How can I be sure I’m here?” since that fakery involves the speaker (in both songs) projecting out what society thinks he should be, not who he actually is as a person. All of this renders the last couple of lines—“I need to know that someone sees that/There’s nothing left, I simply am not here”—as the speaker’s tirade targeted at himself for letting this happen and at his parents for damning their child to this fate. Because the third movement of “Anesthetize” reveal devastating consequences to this prescription-drugs-for-academic-excellence concept even after the child gets clean.
Just like the transition from the second verse into the chorus, the shift from the chorus to the third verse is instantaneous. But since the third verse is as long as the first, this analysis splits it into parts. The words which Steven ascribes to the speaker in this first part should unsettle:
I’m through with pornography.
The acting is lame.
The action is tame.
Explicitly dull.
Arousal annulled.
Your mouth should be boarded up.
Talking all day with nothing to say.
Your shallow proclamations.
All misinformation.
On the surface, the speaker’s statement of “I’m through with pornography” can be looked alone as a positive thing considering how sexuality develops along with hormones. However, the rejection of that may also read as a repudiation of natural and healthy impulses when one considers the emotional and psychological benefits of masturbation. Going deeper into context, to state of porn that “The action is tame” offers a loaded commentary on the state of this teen. Primarily, it reads as a case of desensitization and serial escalation at play because of repeated exposure to pornography in increasingly-extreme forms. One easy conclusion to draw from this involves porn’s impact on teenagers, but another—and even more relevant—matter relates to the theme of technology running throughout the album.
But the real kicker comes from “Explicitly dull./Arousal annulled,” a phrase which carries on the pornography theme of the last line while escalating the problem into something different by means of a complex metaphor. In this case, a quest for pursuing explicit materials reflects a form of rebellion that’s exhibits a need to be extreme for the sake of being extreme. This leads to the notion of “Arousal annulled” having a triple-meaning in terms of what the speaker’s cut off from thanks to the collision of rebellion and the society of the Blank Planet. The triple-meaning rests upon three reasons that people have sex. The first—pleasure—seems obvious, but the fact that the numbness exhibited by this and “Anesthetize” entails a total loss of any sensation. That loss of sensation compromises the second reason—emotional intimacy—and prevents any bond between humans from forming. If the speaker manages to have sex at all, it’s through empty hookups and not a committed relationship. The third reason—procreation—has multiple layers in relation to the speaker. The most important layer being that if the speaker devalues the process by which people are made, he’s devaluing life itself. This is critical not only because such a negative feeling results from depression, but because it undercuts the numbing sensation which the pills and desensitization have otherwise succeeded.
Although the juxtaposition with the lines about pornography might cause one to think that “Your mouth should be boarded up” and the following lines refer to a pornstar, that’s not the case. The “Your” probably refers to the speaker’s mother. Given this mother’s responsibility (possibly due to ignorance) of the effects of the pills on the speaker’s mental health (maybe not since the album doesn’t say whether those problems existed before the pill use, but they likely did), the speaker does have motivation for such vitriol. From “Talking all day with nothing to say,” we can infer that the mom likes speaking but the words are empty platitudes. Mom might be coming at this situation with the right idea in mind, but “Your shallow proclamations./All misinformation” suggests that that’ll mean nothing because she’s woefully unaware of how deep the problems run in her child.
The third verse runs as lengthily as that of the first, so an analysis splits it up into third parts. Regardless, what Steven utters here warrants a look:
My friend says he wants to die.
He’s in a band, they sound like Pearl Jam.
Their clothes are all black.
Their music is crap.
This initial line—“My friend says he wants to die”—introduces a motif that’ll pop up again later on in Fear of a Blank Planet. That motif being suicide/suicidal thoughts as a form of self-destructive escape from the Blank Planet. It should be stressed that when this motif re-appears in tracks like “Way Out of Here” and “Sleep Together” that the action of suicide isn’t glorified on the album, but it isn’t demonized or trivialized or made melodramatic, either. However, this passage of lyrics appear—specifically with the “Their clothes are all black./Their music is crap” lines—to offer a covert diss (either through the speaker or through a subtle intrusion by Steven) on the emo music fad of the mid-2000’s. Which makes the mention of Pearl Jam in the previous line appropriate given that band’s influence on many of the emo bands.
The mention of Pearl Jam in the line “He’s in a band, they sound like Pearl Jam” is a fitting name-drop for a few other reasons—some of which hadn’t come to pass until after 2007. The primary thematic connection comes from Pearl Jam’s status as one of the Big 4 of the Seattle grunge scene (and this is where you come up and may potentially give me some welcome fact-checking, Katie) that cropped up in the early 90’s, a group of bands which included Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Alice In Chains. Where this is bitingly relevant to the suicide discussion comes from the suicide of Nirvana frontman/guitarist Kurt Cobain in 1994. Additionally, Layne Stayley (Alice In Chains frontman) had been largely reclusive for the final six-or-seven years of his life before overdosing on a speedball in 2002. While it’s insincere at best to call an accidental drug overdose like that of Layne Stayley’s a suicide, the drug addiction which plagued Layne (and Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots, to throw in another grunge act) certainly counts as self-destruction. Making drug addiction and suicide two things which start from the same general impulse—a desire to escape the Blank Planet at any cost; self-destruction included.
The 2017 suicide of Chris Cornell links to this notion, but also brings about an irony which Steven couldn’t have predicted in 2007. That irony being that he happened to name-drop the last one of grunge’s Big 4 to stay around with their original frontman (Eddie Vedder, whose vocal range reminds me of Jim Morrison at times). That one of their big early hits was named “Alive” only makes the irony more delicious. Granted, in 2007, Pearl Jam was the only one of the Big 4 of grunge that were still actively touring and recording, so it seemed like they were the genre’s last titan. However, Alice In Chains would regroup in 2009 with their primary guitarist Jerry Cantrell recruiting new frontman William Duvall (who sounds eerily like Layne) and Soundgarden would reform in 2010 in order to last until Cornell’s suicide in 2017.
As for Steven comparing the grunge scene to emo acts revealing something about how he felt about grunge, there’s evidence for and against that. One could cite the lyrics to “Four Chords That Made A Million” and claim that they’re slamming grunge (particularly Nirvana) as disposable, simple pop music that happened to be played somewhat heavily. In another sense, that claim could also hold true for the Britpop movement which spawned bands like Oasis. Considering that “Four Chords That Made A Million” was released in 2000 and that Oasis lost relevance with their 1997’s Be Here Now (an album which wounded Britpop in what NME termed “a coke-fueled monument to 90’s excess”), one could claim that the song’s beating a dead-horse. But that Oasis in the 90’s were seen in the UK as the second coming of The Beatles—to the point where a tape recording of Liam and Noel Gallagher bickering in the studio was released as a single and charted—leads one to think that their rise and fall made them a prime target for Steven’s song.
What I can say with some certainty is that if Steven harbored or still harbors ill feelings for grunge, it isn’t due to holding a grudge over the genre’s success. The first reason being that Steven himself strikes me in interviews as far more soft-spoken and down-to-earth than one would expect out of anyone who’s written lyrics as twisted as those of…well, take your pick out of anything from In Absentia. The second reason requires a look at what Steven recorded in the 90’s. I don’t think anyone pursued success by writing and recording Pink Floyd-esque prog (apart from maybe Pink Floyd themselves), art-pop, ambient music, and/or psychedelic jamming after Nirvana exploded into the mainstream in 1991. That Steven did so well into the new millennium unfettered shows that he couldn’t care less about fame, but did so out of a love for creating music. A love which he (within recent memory) has stated is the reason why he’s opted not to have children.
After that long-and-winding tangent, it’s best to return to the song. Especially since the last bit of lyrics in this verse offer commentary on the speaker’s state-of-mind on several levels:
In school I don’t concentrate.
And sex is kinda fun, but just another one
Of all the empty ways of using up the day.
While “In school I don’t concentrate” remains a line worth dissecting on its own, the meanings that are derived from it are things about prescription drugs in the academic culture of 2007 Britain that I’ve already elaborated on. The lines that follow are where the brunt of analysis lie. To hear the lines “And sex is kinda fun, but just another one/Of all the empty ways of using up the day” and process the callous way in which the speaker describes sex is an off-putting thing. Yes, things such as hookup culture exist and there’s the existence of people who are asexual, but while the line can definitely entail the former (but not the latter), there’s something more at play. By describing the process by which life is created (for this analysis, ‘conception vs birth’ arguments are a ‘chicken and egg’ scenario since pro-life and pro-choice opens up a can of worms that’s off-topic) as just an “empty” way “of using up the day,” the speaker devalues the importance of human life. Such a response is enabled by the empty culture where individuality is stripped away by capitalist-based conformity. In such a climate where resistance is futile, what thinking person would choose to propagate the machine by voluntarily reproducing? Like I said in the earlier line of “Explicitly dull/Arousal annulled,” that’s a rejection of life being anything significant.
There’s also a socio-political element to that same line and the smug ignorance which that line entails. That element reflects on the fact that England (in 2007) had the highest teen-pregnancy rate in Europe as well as the worst sex-ed classes for school children. As the numbers of about 1,000 abortions in 2005 on girls aged 14 and under attest, the ignorance in which the speaker utters these lines carries drastic consequences.
The second chorus of the song begins the same way which the first one does. But after that, there’s a second part of the chorus which Steven adds to the earlier chorus:
Bipolar disorder.
Can’t deal with the boredom.
From the way these lines are echoed, “Bipolar disorder” functions in the most literal sense—the speaker of this song (and album) does indeed have bipolar disorder. I wouldn’t know what being bipolar is like from experience, but I do know about the highs-and-lows which people with it experience and about the fact that medications are used to make the experience manageable. Both of which link into motifs on Fear of a Blank Planet. First, there’s the pills that are mentioned in this song, “Anesthetize,” and “Sentimental.” Then, there’s the fact that the high-and-low has a musical representation in both the lyrics and the music of “Anesthetize.”
As for “Can’t deal with the boredom,” that’s a line which sounds self-explanatory but really isn’t. That line summarizes the state of the speaker’s existence in the Blank Planet rather well. This state of “boredom” comes from the numbness brought on by the pills which were prescribed to him by a society that supplants the youth yet fears them. This speaker may have been doomed from the start to never express himself besides brief moments of rebellion which are soon quelled by prescription drugs. Through all of that, the fact that the speaker “Can’t deal with the boredom” shows that he’s fully aware of the purgatorial conditions that the society of the Blank Planet’s confined him to, but may be too numb to find the motive to escape anymore.
While there’s a multi-sectioned instrumental section after these lyrics, they eventually lead to an outro section where Steven sings this over ghostly-sounding folk instrumentation:
You don’t try to be liked.
You don’t mind.
You feel no sun.
You steal a gun
To kill time.
Now this outro has a shift in pronouns—from “I” to “You”—that tells us that these lines are spoken from a different perspective than the rest of the song. That perspective is unknown, but we can assume that it’s an omniscient viewpoint. If so, this could serve as one of the few times on Fear of a Blank Planet where Steven voices his own thoughts on the matter. With such an assumption in mind, this section of the song can read as pity, condemnation, or a complex blend of both traits.
To see this in effect, look no further than the first cluster of lines: “You don’t try to be liked./You don’t mind Those two lines seem like the omniscient narrator/Steven pitying the speaker by finding three things about his state lamentable: the social isolation, his surrender to the Blank Planet, and total apathy. That second trait supports the idea of “Fear of a Blank Planet” taking place from the perspective of a different speaker than the rest of the album. Since if this speaker’s already seen any resistance as futile and just gave up, there’s no way for the rest of the album to happen. Making this entire song one way which the motifs of prescription drugs, depression, and pressure utterly ruin lives while the rest of the album details the stages of another way of ruination.
Where a tinge of condemnation factors into the equation comes from the middle line of this stanza: “You feel no sun.” By a tinge, that means that it applies equally to the youths and the society of the Blank Planet which destroyed their chance of living before it even began. Using the lack of feeling, there’s a sense of being out-of-touch in the sense of a generation gap. However, the gap isn’t just between generations, but between nature and artificiality. This means that what Steven/narrator decries is that human existence has—by repudiating nature with the indoor isolation of technology—become as artificial as the culture of the Blank Planet. Human beings are losing their capacity to be human.
These last two lines of this set—“You steal a gun/To kill time”—struck me as brilliant from the moment I first heard it. Considering that I first heard this song when I was 16, I initially liked these lines because they were somewhat edgy yet gave an air of sophistication. As a twenty-three-year-old with a double-bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and English Literature, I enjoy these lines for a different reason now. That reason involves the complexity of how the parts—the “gun,” the “steal,” and the “kill time”—interlock. The simplest of the three components—“gun”—is both an artificial source of power and a symbol of brute force triumphing over intelligence. By saying that the gun’s stolen, the narrator paints the speaker in the same light as a usurper since the gun was never his to take. Or rather, killing time’s an impossible goal akin to the task Victor Frankenstein set out to achieve by reanimating corpses in Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein.” So yes, one can take this phrase from a ‘playing God’ angle, but there’s more to “kill time” than just that. The action of killing time’s simultaneously an indication of the speaker’s numbing boredom, an observation that anyone who surrenders to the Blank Planet is wasting their life, pointing out that the ravages of time (by always being victorious) will murder everyone, and a warning against Promethean impulses as constituting a case of ‘biting off more than you can chew.’
The second set of lines in the outro—not missing a beat from where the first ends—involve Steven raising a pretty bleak picture of the speaker’s life:
You’re somewhere.
You’re nowhere.
You don’t care.
You catch the breeze.
You still the leaves.
So now where?
The construction of the first line-cluster—“You’re somewhere./You’re nowhere/You don’t care”—utilizes a contradiction to great effect by punctuating it with that last line. The effect renders the contradiction irrelevant because location doesn’t matter whenever the speaker’s problems are irresolvable with the current state of treating mental health. In fact, there’s the impression that it would take nothing less than a ‘magic pill’ which cures everything to resolve the speaker’s problems. That speaks volumes about the expectations of the speaker, how thoroughly the pills have ruined his life, and the limitations of the treatment of mental health.
The havoc inflicted upon the speaker’s life is given a visual example via the lines “You catch the breeze/You still the leaves.” Sure, there’s the expression of ‘catch the breeze,’ but it’s not possible to literally catch air. Likewise, to “still the leaves” places something natural in a state of Fall and oncoming demise. Both images suggest that the effect of the pills on the speaker’s life is as unnatural as literally catching the breeze and as much of a death sentence as leaves falling from a tree. All three instances constitute a violation of what occurs naturally.
The song’s final line—“So now where?”—always came across as an enigmatic capper for a killer riff-monster of a song. Looking at it through the lens of the rest of the song, this line makes perfect sense. Namely that it relates to several concerns throughout the entire song. There’s the question mark suggesting that the serial-escalation of extremity proves an endless rabbit-hole. This is because of location being irrelevant like it was earlier in the same stanza, but now location fails to quell human impulses. The human impulse links to the greed and hollow capitalism-enabled materialism peddled by the Blank Planet. It insidiously makes people believe that there’s a hole to fill in their lives, but the pills make this worse. Worse because the effect of the pills upon identity leads to an artificial absence of the soul that renders the “curse of there must be more” (as “Anesthetize” phrases it) an endless cycle.
Musically, “Fear of a Blank Planet” introduces itself (on some editions) with the sound of keyboard clacks, but the song really starts (at around 0:04) with a 6/4 acoustic strumming rhythm played at a tempo of 160 BPM. It’s an elegant riff of eighth-notes that changes root notes every measure in an ostinato-like pattern. Steven chose wisely to have this pattern serve as not only the song’s main riff, but as the general pattern which he sings along to in the verses. Sure, the riff comes at a brisk pace due to the fast tempo, but the repetition makes the riff as understandable as the subjects that Steven sings about in this album.
Steven isn’t alone forever since Gavin plays a brief fill (at about 0:21) and immediately puts his nose to the grindstone by keeping a steady rhythm. A rhythm which—since a 6/4 time signature acts like a 4/4 with an extra two beats—Gavin is able to employ his snare on the even-numbered beats in the same way he would if he were playing in 4/4. Even if the accented snares every second beat and the steady eighth-note hi-hats are delivered in a regular pattern, Gavin likes (and this is ample room for me to gush about Gavin’s phenomenal drumming; see the second movement of “Anesthetize”) substituting things out if he feels that it suits the rhythm at any given point. This boils down to little things within the span of a sixteenth-note. Favorite tactics of his are subtly changing where kick-pedals are placed and playing ghost-snares as a lead-in to the next measure. So a rule of thumb with Gavin is that—owing to his jazz background—other than the core of the rhythm, he can spice it up however he pleases and make it look like a natural part of the song.
After a fill from Gavin involving toms and snares, Richard and Colin enter (at around 0:39) on their respective instruments. Richard plays in-sync with Steven’s guitar figure—now buried pretty deep in the sound—via a tone which sound a lot like a clean-toned guitar fed through a synthesizer. Colin plays something completely different: a rhythm which jumps between two notes in an alternating jazz-like fashion. But it’s the machine-like tone of Colin’s instrument that really sells it. It sounds so much like the speaker’s state-of-mind that it’s frightening.
The first verse (at about 0:57) utilizes the same instrumentation as the moment Richard and Colin entered the song, so there’s nothing new to discuss there. However, Steven’s rapid-fire delivery of these verses reflect a state of information overload and a familiarity (in regards to the speaker) that the listener has to sit back and take in. Following that, the song abruptly shifts (at around 1:33) to what seems like a new pattern. I mean, Richard playing what sounds like synth strings and Steven jumping to a heavy-metal guitar riff are new developments, right? While the former is certainly new, a close listen reveals that Steven’s heavy riff is in-sync with Colin’s bass rhythm that’s still going steady through this section. Gavin also remains rhythmically undeterred—only changing from hitting hi-hats to hitting ride-cymbal and implementing more aggressive fills.
The only difference between the first verse and the second (starting at about 1:50) is that Steven’s heavy riff carries over from the prior section. Apart from that, it’s nearly-identical in instrumentation. Which leads to the chorus (beginning at around 2:08), where there are some differences in the song. For starters, the time signature has changed to 4/4. And for all that I said earlier about the song’s lyrics being anything but anthemic, the instrumentation certainly lends this chorus the feel of a stadium-rock anthem. The mixture of Steven four chords (not the four chords, but chords of A7sus4, F7sus4, D7sus4, and A#7sus4) ringing out for two measures apiece, Colin’s busily bubbling bassline, Richard’s soaring synths, and Gavin’s workman-like drumming allows for a taut rhythm that’s surprisingly catchy. And that’s partly due to this instrumentation leaving the song wide-open for Steven to belt out the lyrics to his heart’s content.
Which only makes the chorus feel incomplete when it suddenly shifts (at about 2:32) to 6/4 time signature of the third verse. And apart from the filter applied to Steven’s voice in the first half of the verse (which makes him sound machine-like), it’s the same as the second verse. The second chorus (beginning at around 3:07)—along with shifting back to 4/4—brings everything that was anthemic about the last chorus along with it. But (at about 3:32) then, the chorus doesn’t cut off into another verse like last time. Instead, there’s a continuation of the same rhythm, but with “Bipolar disorder/Can’t deal with the boredom” being howled out by Steven like a lone voice in the wilderness.
That’s not the end of the song, though. Far from it. After two revolutions of the second phase of the chorus, the song goes back to acoustic guitar (at around 3:55) for a multi-stage build-up section that’s played in a 5/4 time signature. Steven’s able to fit the opening 6/4 guitar figure into a 5/4 time signature by reducing the amount of notes, making some notes sustains, and allowing the remaining notes to create a swinging feel as Steven plucks them on adjacent strings. For now, it’s just Steven and a sound-effect resembling distant static. But Richard eventually arrives (at about 4:10) to play some spacy-sounding sustains.
Gavin re-emerges in the song with a drum fill involving eighth-note triplets (at around 4:23), which ends up leading into the next stage of the build-up. Here, Steven modifies the intro pattern so that a steady stream of eighth-notes fit into the 5/4 time signature. Meanwhile, Richard employs several layers of keyboards—one of which carries over from earlier and another being an intermittently-appearing flurry of sixteenth-notes. Gavin’s main has ride-cymbal, kick-pedal, and snare. However, he also employs a flourish of two different types of ride-cymbals every now and again that practically shimmers out of the speakers.
Soon after, Colin turns up again (at about 4:40) to use his bass like a rhythm guitar with a tone that sounds like a rumbling thunder. Which is rather apt given the flurry of notes that Gavin unleashes during his 4/4 miniature drum solo prior to entering the heavier portion of the bridge (at around 4:57). Here, Gavin plays a straight-away rock beat. Meanwhile, Richard stays out of the limelight. The stars of this section are the in-sync goodness of Steven’s guitar and Colin’s bass as they deftly maneuver around various riffs that operate on darker shades.
This ends up segueing back into the 6/4 verse rhythm (at about 5:21) for Steven’s guitar solo. It’s a solo that’s just fuzz-toned goodness from start to finish and—while it won’t win any awards for technical precision—it suits the song like a glove. Just the way it slowly builds up before it goes into ugly-sounding single-notes and eventually culminates in a rapid stream of eighth-note triplets ends up benefiting the song more than hurting it. In fact, without it, the transition to the next part would come across as forced.
At the instant which Steven hits the final sustain of his guitar solo (at around 5:57), the entire song takes an unexpected turn from loud to soft. This registers as the outro, where there are folk-like strumming patterns, laid-back sustains from Colin, atmospheric keyboard parts from Richard, and a steady rhythm from Gavin utilizing snare, kick-pedal, and hi-hat (open and closed). It’s worth pointing out that Steven’s acoustic strumming pattern operates in four sets of chord-clusters: a) D5 and Asus4, b) Emin7/C and G5, c) G#, d) G, and e) F and C7. Keep in mind that these are often switched at a sixteenth-note’s notice, so this isn’t the easiest thing in the world to play on guitar.
The outro verse (which begins at about 6:32) follows the general instrumental formula of the outro. Nothing to see there. But afterwards, the song Steven’s voice echoes for a bit as the instruments crash out for the song to end.
As far as opening tracks are concerned, “Fear of a Blank Planet” sets the tone for the album well. The voice of the speaker practically comes bursting out of the speakers thanks to the rapid-fire delivery that Steven uses for the verses. Under that troubled-teen persona comes one of Steven’s densest set of lyrics to date. Mostly owing to how well-connected “Fear of a Blank Planet” is to other songs of the album, but that also remains indebted to how many onion-like layers of context that the song has towards various. All of this runs throughout Fear of a Blank Planet, but will take on special relevance in “Anesthetize,” the one song on Fear of a Blank Planet which may warrant even more lyrical analysis than this one. And the one Porcupine Tree song I’ve been itching to talk about even more than “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here.”
Regarding the song’s sound, the near-constant usage of electric guitar riffs at a lower tuning (if I recall correctly, it’s in Drop C) render “Fear of a Blank Planet” the heaviest song the band had recorded up to this point. While “Blackest Eyes,” “Gravity Eyelids,” “Strip The Soul,” and “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here” all contained riffs as heavy or heavier than the ones scattered throughout this song, those songs all had moments of respite. Here, the only significant bit of rest comes via the outro. As such, the pick of this as a single was a decision (whether one made by Steven or Roadrunner Records doesn’t matter) that catered towards metal-heads. Given that this album marked the first time Porcupine Tree had entered the Top 100 of the US Billboard 200 (debuting at #59), ended up outselling Deadwing, entered the European Top 100 Albums at #21, and charted the Top 40 in markets such as the UK, the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Norway, and Poland, the risk of releasing something as abrasive as “Fear of a Blank Planet” as the lead single did pay off for the band. While not an extreme commercial success, 250,000 copies worldwide for a band that are by no means megastars isn’t anything to sneeze at. And I’m pretty sure Steven preferred it that way since he’s always been frank about not being in it for the money.
But this isn’t the best moment on the album. That’s still yet to come.
“My Ashes” (5:07)
While “Fear of a Blank Planet,” “Anesthetize,” “Sentimental,” “Way Out of Here,” and “Sleep Together” all contain endings which are either bittersweet, horrifying, melancholic, or tear-jerking, “My Ashes” stands out as the one genuinely happy song on Fear of a Blank Planet. The song’s not fully happy given that it’s the first one in the C-path (“My Ashes,” “Sentimental,” “Way Out of Here,” and “Sleep Together”), but the song also marks the happiest moments in the life of this sequence’s speaker. So on its own, “My Ashes” works as one of Porcupine Tree’s more uplifting ballads, eclipsed only by “Lazarus” in that merit. As part of Fear of a Blank Planet, the knowledge that the speaker will decline further and further into despair in the last three songs on the album ends up retroactively casting a dark cloud over an otherwise-sunny song.
In an inversion of my usual technique, the music will be talked about before the lyrics. This is due to the fact that as far as the music is concerned, “My Ashes” stands out as the simplest song on the album—a constant 4/4 at a tempo of 110 BPM. What the song lacks in complexity is compensated for beauty. With the exception of “Lazarus” from Deadwing, this might stand as the most beautiful ballad in the discography. In fact, with how low-key and restrained the song sounds, it’s a surprise that this (along with “Sentimental”) wasn’t picked as a single. While the title track proves infectiously-catchy despite its crushing riffs, “My Ashes” and “Sentimental” sound more radio-friendly. Especially towards avenues dealing with listeners where aggressive guitar riffs would be a turn off. More impressively, both songs accomplish this without sacrificing Steven’s songwriting techniques—just the instrumentation. This song can definitely count as a song where the instruments count as background music, but a careful listen reveals otherwise. To a first-time listener, one hears Steven strumming simple acoustic guitar chords in a laid-back rhythm. One also hears Gavin’s drums enter after the first chorus, but they’re far more stripped-down than anything else Gavin plays on the album—letting the song breathe. Ditto with Colin’s bass, which boils down to basic sustains. The instrument on the song which stands out in “My Ashes” comes from Richard’s keyboards. By using an array of pianos, synths, and strings that can be described (respectively) as smooth, washed-out, and bombastic, Richard acts akin to a painter throughout “My Ashes.” Indeed, the song would come across as empty and lifeless without Richard.
As far as the lyrics to “My Ashes” are concerned, the song’s first verse is sung in a rather low-key manner by Steven:
All the things that I needed
And wasted my chances
I have found myself wanting.
When my mother and father
Gave me their problems,
I accepted them all.
Nothing ever expected.
I was rejected,
But I came back for more.
One should contextualize theses lines (and “My Ashes” in general) as the speaker reflecting back on how his childhood made him into the troubled person which the speaker is on the “Sentimental”/“Way Out of Here”/“Sleep Together” song sequence. As for what these lines mean, let’s start by taking a look at “All the things that I needed/And wasted my chances/I have found myself wanting.” These lines carry notions of envy, materialism, and regrets. That first line alone—“All the things that I needed”—conveys that the speaker’s childhood wasn’t spent as wisely as it could’ve been. Fun is an important part of childhood, but so are social connections. Those social connections are what “wasted my chances” refers to, but there’s also an idea that the time the speaker’s spent pining for the holes in his life to be filled were a waste of time. A waste of time because that pining ultimately did nothing whereas others applied themselves to the fullest. In both these lines, the speaker exudes a sense of envy for those who achieved what he failed to do in order to be successful.
Another layer gets introduced into the picture via the lines “When my mother and father/Gave me their problems,/I accepted them all.” The first takeaway from such lines involves stating that these harsh parent/child relations constitute a toxic presence. This song’s focus on memory chooses to emphasize the severity of these relations because their toxicity played a role in killing the speaker’s inner child. And in a perversion, to say that mom and dad “Gave me their problems” suggests a degree of irresponsibility in the parents. Whether or not that’s true remains unsaid since Fear of a Blank Planet stays in the teen perspective for its entirety, but parental irresponsibility apparently results in children like the speaker growing up at an accelerated rate. A societal takeaway from life in the Blank Planet would connote that that accelerated rate is one that’s too fast for the child to successfully transition into adulthood. As for “I accepted them all,” that reflects a power imbalance between children and authority figures since an impressionable child wouldn’t feel like they could refuse.
The concept of that power imbalance smoothly transitions into the next set of lyrics: “Nothing ever expected/I was rejected.” To go at this backwards, “rejected” isn’t the parents disowning the speaker. Instead, it’s the child feeling like he hasn’t received a just reward for all that he does for his parents by “accepting them all.” Remember how I said that the Blank Planet itself ingrains into the social consciousness through the principles of capitalism? These lines in particular mark one of the prime examples of this on the album. It’s clear that the idea of tasks coming with a reward (the profit motive) was something that the speaker learned at a very young age and that’s likely due to the Blank Planet priming that principle. The contrast between that and “Nothing ever expected” results in one conclusion—the unconditional love of a family conflicts with the profit motive of the capitalist Blank Planet. Since the notion of unconditional love has been observed in nature with several species of animals, the fact that the Blank Planet has undermined suggests that the Blank Planet has undone nature. They’ve done so by means of pitting one human impulse (the need for more and more) against another (familial bonds). That state of impulse versus impulse can definitely be read in “But I came back for more,” a line which suggests that the speaker has no way of escaping from this situation. Partly because he’s still a child under the care of his parents and partly because these two impulses are so hard-wired into the human condition that there’s no escaping them.
One notable thing about the sound of the first rendition of the chorus is that unlike the later one, Steven sings this one unaccompanied except for Richard’s keyboards:
And my ashes drift beneath the silver sky
Where a boy rides on a bike, but never smiles.
And my ashes fall over all the things we said
On a box of photographs under the bed.
Apart from the use of the phrase “And my ashes” in the odd-numbered lines, the chorus of “My Ashes” changes every time it’s played. That means that they’re part of the story. The motif of “ashes” as a whole isn’t one related to fire, but related to what cremation does to a body. Namely that ashes are remnants of a human body. Likewise, the images in the choruses are remnants of the speaker’s memories. Meaning that each set of two lines make up a coherent thought.
The first train of thought in this chorus—“And my ashes drift beneath the silver sky/Where a boy ride on a bike, but never smiles”—marks a case where a present-day event sparks a recollection. The scene described comes across as rather vivid. So the speaker’s currently walking outside on an overcast day when he passes by a somewhat-depressed boy on a bike. The sight of which reminds the speaker of an earlier time where he was doing the exact thing as the boy who just passed him by. Such a theme of recollection takes on a darker, more melancholy twist with “Sentimental” (specifically the chorus).
The second train of thought—“And my ashes fall over all the things we said/On a box of photographs under the bed”—isn’t a literal memory like the first one. Instead, “all the things we said” entails a cluster of memories that come flooding back at once. The wording of ashes that “fall over” seems like this comes involuntarily since the pattern of ashes flying in the wind isn’t directly controllable. In that case, these memories can easily mark things which haunt the speaker. The image which ends the chorus—“On a box of photographs under the bed”—carries importance as well. After all, “photographs” are objects of memory the instant after the photo is taken. Additionally, putting them in a box places them in a cluster. Finally, that they’re “under the bed” suggests that the memories have been forgotten. Or at least that the speaker tried to forget them.
The second, shorter verse which Steven sings in a similar manner to that of the first warrants elaboration:
I will stay in my own world
Under the covers.
I will feel safe inside.
A kiss that will burn me
And cure me of dreaming.
I was always returning.
The first bit of this—“I will stay in my own world/Under the covers”—constitutes a form of escapism that’ll have detrimental effects later on. In a sense, he wishes to serve as creator of his own form of reality thanks to “my own world.” In another sense, the speaker repudiates what he considers the negative qualities of the real world. More specifically, qualities that the speaker’s left unable to relate to. This self-imposed isolation draws parallels to that of the wall which Pink (from Pink Floyd’s 1979 concept album The Wall) built around his home to protect himself from a society he felt jaded towards (the song most people know from that album, “Another Brick in the Wall Part II” comes long before any of that happens).
The reality of such isolation gets undercut by a subtle word choice in the line “I will feel safe inside.” The key word of contention is “feel” for two reasons. The first is rather simple—feeling isn’t the same as being. The second reason isn’t known to the listener yet, but a line in “Sentimental” states that the Path B speaker also takes pills. Therefore, the numbing effect of those pills witnessed in “Fear of a Blank Planet” and used as the focal point of “Anesthetize” also applies to this song’s speaker. With this in mind, it stands to reason that it’s doubtful whether the speaker can feel anything. As for the notion of safety coming from isolation, that security may create safety for a short period of time, but the isolation will eventually do more damage than the opposite ever could.
The next image—“A kiss that will burn me/And cure me of dreaming”—isn’t a simple one. For starters, “kiss” isn’t a literal kiss, but the image of adulthood via giving childhood the kiss of death. As to why that “will burn me,” the kiss provides a painful reminder that he lost his inner child far earlier than he should. That detail’s consistent with the strained parent/child relations established in the previous verse. What makes this sadder is that the speaker doesn’t think he ever had the chance to be a carefree kid. Therefore, he’s clinging onto whatever scraps of childhood he has left. This means that “cure” reads as biting sarcasm since the ambitions and desires suggested by “dreaming”—itself a childhood characteristic—are something that the speaker doesn’t wish to be cured from. The easy takeaway from “I was always returning” now entails that the speaker’s been forced to return to a reality where adulthood is fast approaching—no matter how fervently he clings onto the remnants of his childhood. With that, the stage is set for “Sentimental”
That’s not a happy conclusion, but the last chorus offers something different to chew on. In that regard, Steven’s words warrant a look:
And my ashes find a way beyond the fog
And return to save the child that I forgot.
And my ashes fade among the things unseen
And a dream plays in reverse on piano keys.
And my ashes drop upon a park in Wales.
Never-ending clouds of rain, and distant sails.
The way which these set of lines start—“And my ashes find a way beyond the fog/And return to save the child that I forgot”—create a discrepancy between the states of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. More importantly, the fog marks the span of time in years. In this sense, the ashes aren’t just recollecting memories for the sake of remembrance because the memories are an active participant that aids what the speaker realizes. The speaker realizes here that he still has a shred of childhood innocence left in him. One conclusion raised from that realization entails that—metaphorically speaking—the ashes have saved the childhood that the speaker wishes he had the opportunity to live. Considering both the symbolism of the fog as the fuzzy memories of events that happened years ago and the previously-established notion of strained parent-child relations, there’s the possibility that these memories are distorted. Distorted in order to make the experiences depicted in the memories happier than they were in actuality. Therefore, the happiness of this might only be possible via self-deception.
That self-deception does play into the next line: “And my ashes fade among the things unseen.” Mostly through the fact that for the ash-symbolized memories to “fade among the things unseen,” there’s considerations of chance and the random factoring into play. Chance because of the unpredictable pattern of ash spreading through the world via the wind, which means that the memories that get conjured up are done so at random. Or mostly at random since there’s a sense that the ashes operate in a pattern of continually moving into the past.
Regarding that pattern, the line “And a dream plays in reverse on piano keys” presents a stunningly poetic image via the use of a music metaphor to illustrate the pattern of the ashes/memories. But it goes further considering that the speaker uses the word “dream” as a synonym for life, indicating that—while these recollections occur in his head—he’s in disbelief that his life could’ve ever been so happy. As for the “piano keys,” there’s a black-and-white imagery in this, but instead of them serving as a metaphor for racial harmony (see Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory”), it’s for the good times and the bad times in life. Regarding the “dream”—or life—playing “in reverse,” that’s the aforementioned pattern of the ashes. Namely that the memories are coming to him in reverse chronological order. Which culminates in with the next line—“And my ashes drop upon a park in Wales”—mentioning “Wales,” a part of the United Kingdom that’s presumably the speaker’s birthplace. Indicating that the ashes/memories have gone as far back as it can possibly go.
The final image on the song—one of “Never-ending clouds of rain and distant sails”—reads as two-in-one. However, it perfectly marks what the speaker of the song hopes for. Sure, the “Never-ending clouds of rain” comes across as a threatening image for the present. But it’s the “distant sails” that’s of true importance. I honestly don’t think that that image can mean anything other than the promise of a bright future being achieved by going off-the-beaten-path. Especially given that Steven sings those two words three times—once normally, once held out for a bit, and once in a harmonious wail. There’s some emphasis that the speaker believes everything will end up okay in the end and Steven’s vocal performance convinces you the same. As a result, “My Ashes” definitely has the happiest ending of any song on Fear of a Blank Planet when looked at as a stand-alone song. When “My Ashes” gets looked at in the context of the rest of the songs on the album, the song gets colored by the darker emotions of the rest of the songs in Path B: “Sentimental,” “Way Out of Here” and “Sleep Together.”
Overall, “My Ashes” is such an effective display of Steven’s songwriting techniques in a taut five-minute package that it amazes me that this wasn’t picked as a single. While the song doesn’t have the technical precision of a track like “Anesthetize,” it’s more than made up for by the depth of the lyrics and the constant state of crescendo as more-and-more layers of depth are added. That Steven does all that while maintaining a laid-back sonic palate which wouldn’t sound out-of-place on adult contemporary or pop stations serves as proof of the versatility of his musical formula.
The song’s positioning on Fear of a Blank Planet does warrant discussion since it plays a major part of the album’s overall pacing and feel. “My Ashes” comes sandwiched between the title track and “Anesthetize,” two songs which can overwhelm the listener upon a first listen, but for different reasons. With the title track, it’s the heavy riffs and rapid-fire lyrics which comprise the majority of that song. Whereas with “Anesthetize,” the track’s long runtime (close to eighteen minutes), suite-like structure, and diverse array of sounds can feel like too much to take in. In this respect, placing “My Ashes” in-between those two songs functions as a breather.
Unique among Porcupine Tree’s epics, “Anesthetize” operates as a three-part suite where each of the three movements could stand alone as strong songs. But the three parts add up to something which far exceeds the sum of its parts. The extent of how well “Anesthetize” exceeds the sum of its parts renders the song the greatest piece of music that Steven Wilson wrote under the Porcupine Tree name. In Absentia may be a stronger album than Fear of a Blank Planet, but this is a stronger song than anything on In Absentia or Deadwing. All in one place, “Anesthetize” houses every one of Steven’s songwriting techniques, a strong display of lyrical depth, and the fullest capabilities of each member of his band.
The overall lyrics tell a singular perspective (which I’ll term Path C) distinct from the other songs on Fear of a Blank Planet, but the same themes and motifs still apply. Prescription drug addiction, depression, desensitization, anti-social behavior, and self-loathing all come into play during the song’s nearly eighteen-minute runtime. However, there’s hardly another moment where the teenage persona which Steven adopts for the lyrics of Fear of a Blank Planet comes across as effectively as the final movement of “Anesthetize.” For that alone, the song has the strongest lyrics on the entire album. But like the rest of the album, it hardly comes across as angsty.
As for as instrumentation, each of the three sections varies drastically. While the second movement builds upon the foundation of the first, there’s also distinct differences between the two. For instance, the first movement has a hazy quality that owes a debt to Radiohead whereas the second movement contains the heaviest guitar work in the whole discography. That’s not even counting the third movement, which sounds far softer than the rest of the song—even approaching some of Pink Floyd’s older ballads in terms of how tranquil it sounds.
Because of this song’s extreme length, I’ll be splitting the analysis parts on each of the three movements.
I: “I Simply Am Not Here”
The song starts out with a tribal drum beat on the toms from Gavin (get used to me using his name a lot later on because he’s a monster on this track) while Steven plays a Radiohead-esque guitar riff. This ends up serving as the backdrop for Steven’s delivery of the verses:
A good impression of myself.
Not much to conceal.
I’m saying nothing,
But I’m saying nothing with feel.
The very first line of the song—“A good impression of myself”—offers substantial room for discussion. To start, it evokes a similar line from “Normal” (a track from Nil Recurring, a four-song EP of outtakes from Fear of a Blank Planet which are strong in their own right) and is an allusion to the first line of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Lunar Park: “You do an awfully good impression of yourself.” That book isn’t insignificant since Steven has stated that that book was a source of influence in the making of this album. As for what the line itself means, Steven’s delivery emphasize “impression” enough to make it the key-word of the line. That word gives off a sense of fakery in regards to personal identity. Almost as if the prescription drug intake outlined in the title track eroded the speaker’s sense of identity to the point where the “myself” in this line isn’t the actual self, but what society wants him to conform to. This expands upon the theme of individuality from the title track in that rebellion remains so rooted in some that it becomes an expression of the self which the prescription drugs end up restraining via the erosion of identity.
While the previous line suggests that the speaker’s true self slumbers inside him, “Not much to conceal” throws a wrench into the matter. By claiming that there’s “Not much to conceal” of the speaker, there’s an escalation in the severity of the net effect of the Blank Planet’s hollowing routine. Now, there isn’t a true self left because the erosion of identity has effectively killed the speaker’s real self. The insidiousness of that comes from the fact that it’s possible that the speaker’s real self was killed before the speaker could even know what it entailed.
Before going any further, now appears as good a time as any to address the significance of the song’s title. In doing so, the official definition of “anesthetize” reads:
A-nes-the-tize (verb): deprive of feeling or awareness; loss of sensation and usually of consciousness without loss of vital functions artificially produced by the administration that block the passage of pain impulses along nerve pathways to the brain; to induce anesthesia.
Regarding what’s we can glean from that, there’s the motif of “loss of sensation” which means Steven picked a perfect title. Because “loss of sensation” and “consciousness” occur and pervade this song in several ways: the lyrics, the structure, the instrumentation, and Steven’s vocal delivery. This entire song embodies the word “anesthetize” with such eerie perfection that it leaves a lasting impression on a listener.
Another intriguing part of the definition that’s worth mentioning comes from “block the passage of pain impulses along nerve pathways to the brain.” A vital part of the song since it indicates that—unlike the speaker of Path A—the speaker of this song becomes a prescription drug addict. While addiction’s a disease, the decision which the speaker of this song makes (especially in the second movement) is to indulge in it instead of seeking help. Any addict would say that seeking help’s not an easy choice, but it’s a choice nonetheless. Also worth mentioning is that due to the Blank Planet motif, the lyrics don’t demonize addicts. Instead, they’re victims of a system which stacked the cards against them from the start. Doubly so if you’re a POC.
This destruction of sensation factors into the lines that end this verse: “I’m saying nothing/But I’m saying nothing with feel.” With “I’m saying nothing,” the fact that the speaker’s been stripped of sensation and discouraged of free thought makes this line chilling since without either quality, there’s nothing individualized or relevant in any words he could possibly utter. Likewise, to say that the speaker’s “saying nothing with feel” becomes icily apt. Since the line registers as a self-acknowledgement that—without emotion—the speaker might as well say nothing at all because any words spoken without conviction end up sounding worthless and hollow. Given that a line in a later song on the album (“Way Out of Here”) suggests that the parents offer hollow platitudes, there’s a possibility that feelings like this are a part of growing up and slowly becoming complacent with the way the world is. The reason that comes across as harshly as it does for the speaker is the identity-eroding effect of the prescription drugs.
The chorus of the first section—expertly delivered by Steven—has loads of tiny details which converge into a whole:
I simply am not here.
No way I…
Shut up, be happy.
Stop whining please.
Astute listeners would doubtless detect that the line “I simply am not here” has an identical wording to a phrase in the last line of the chorus of “Fear of a Blank Planet.” The sentiment of the phrase’s appearance in that song—that the emotional numbness and the erosion of identity brought on by the pills results in an inability to express the self—still applies here. However, the way in which Steven emphasizes and draws out this line renders the meaning of the phrase come from a different angle than before. That angle comes in the form of a sense of panicked disgust at what the speaker’s become.
The line which follows that up—an unfinished cry of “No way I…”—serves multiple functions at once. First, it occurs immediately after the previous line in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Secondly, the words themselves convey a state of denial that the speaker’s fallen as far as he has. Thirdly and most importantly, the unfinished state of the line registers as an incomplete thought—indicating that the prescription pill abuse of the speaker has left his train-of-thought too scatterbrained to complete coherent thoughts without jumping to the next. Alternatively, the reason for the incomplete though can be that the speaker knew how that thought ended and chose not to give himself further discomfort by going into that train-of-thought.
One interpretation of the next couple of lines—“Shut up, be happy/Stop whining please”—supports the scatterbrained train-of-thought idea with the suggestion that these two lines make up another thought which interrupts the previous one. However, these two lines also have another interpretation—that they’re the words of the speaker’s parents. In this example, the parents are coming from the right place, but several factors snowball into the conclusion that they’re out-of-touch with the lives of modern teens. That out-of-touch quality pertains to the Blank Planet which the adults won’t give up because it benefits them. That generation gap combined with the rapid pace of technological growth results in a paradigm where the world inhabited by the speaker’s parents in their adolescence is a whole different beast than that of the present—it’s little wonder that they’re clueless about the lives of modern teens. And another component of that comes from technology creating new addictions in modern adolescents. Addictions put in place and facilitated by the Blank Planet, but end up wearing thin. That wearing thin ends up restoring the original hole in the self (made undetectable by the prescription drugs) without solving the original problem. Considering all this conjecture about existence becoming meaningless via desensitization, the idea of being told to cheer up is doomed to failure. Because for it to work, it would mean that the speaker would be convinced that he’s content when the whole album points to the contrary.
The second and last verse of the song’s first section is delivered in a similar manner to that of the first, but Steven adds subtle differences:
And because of who we are
We react in mock surprise.
The curse of ‘there must be more.’
So don’t breathe here.
Don’t leave your bags.
This first line—“And because of who we are”—has several components to look into. First, the way this line begins with “And”—a word entailing an in-media-res quality—suggests that people like the speaker could’ve had fulfilling lives had they been born in the generations prior to the Blank Planet system. As is, they were born too late to do anything to alter the system or prevent it from happening.
Second, “because” paints a cause-and-effect relationship between rebellion and the self or between the self and restraint. The former’s been documented in the title track, but the latter works by proxy of the former. Namely that because rebellion comes as an expression of the self, the fact that restraint (i.e. pills) comes as a punishment from rebellion means that they’re also a punishment for a teenager being themselves. If the Blank Planet system weren’t so barbaric to begin with, teenagers wouldn’t have to resort to such extreme measures of expressing themselves.
Third, the way that the speaker uses “we” instead of “I” comes across as striking. On one level, that substitution’s a grammatical representation of a collective erasing the identity of an individual. But considering the social isolation and depression that the speaker exhibits, that change from “I” to “we” can also read as the speaker trying to make himself seem not so isolated. Because even the speaker has some awareness that he’s not the only person going through this.
Lastly, the manner in which “are” ends this line suggests that the current state of “who we are” is unchangeable. However, this gets somewhat undercut by the fact that “who we are” wasn’t how these people were like when they were born, but the result of perversions by way of the Blank Planet and the pills. But on another level, there are unchangeable factors. Remember the ‘impulse vs impulse’ struggle of the “Nothing ever expected/I was rejected” lines from “My Ashes?” That’s right, even ‘unchangeable’ factors such as familial bonds and the profit motive aren’t so much of a certainty when the two are pitted against each other. And from the words of the speaker in “My Ashes,” one can see that the Blank Planet undermines familial bonds via pitting it against the profit motive.
The line which comes afterward—“We react in mock surprise”—offers some similarity to the line “The vaguest of shrugs” from the title track. That similarity comes from the fact that the “shrugs” and the “mock surprise” both stem from the suppressed emotions rooted in the prescription drug abuse. While there is that similarity, the use of the word “react” serves as enough to make this line different from the one in the title track. That one word of “react” indicates that while the pills minimize responses to stimuli, they don’t eliminate it. This leaves some room for a future recovery if the speaker gets off of the pills.
As previously mentioned in my write-up for the title track, the line of “The curse of ‘there must be more’” has the same conceit as the title track’s final line (“So now where?”). In both lines, there’s a sense that a human impulse (which I’ve termed ‘the conqueror’s complex’ since ancient conquerors aimed to seize control of everything they could) has been turned into a weapon by the Blank Planet in order to benefit capitalism via materialism. In particular, a sense of materialism which leads people to believe that they need to fill a hole in their lives. However, the effects of pills on identity render this state of materialism into an endless loop. This entire idea points to the inhumane heart of the capitalist regime since the Blank Planet—as a metaphor—isn’t far off from the effects of how capitalism is practiced in reality.
In regards to the lines which conclude this verse—“So don’t breathe here/Don’t leave your bags”—, that’s a set of lines which I feel like I’m a little iffy on their interpretation. To start with “don’t breathe here,” the mention of natural processes being suppressed in service of the Blank Planet speaks volumes. It’s a statement that the erosion of identity remains synonymous with a slow death that starts with the self. Continuing into “Don’t leave your bags,” the mention of shopping bags—when juxtaposed with “don’t breathe here”—emphasizes the importance of capitalism in the Blank Planet. So much so that money is prized over humanity.
“Anesthetize” begins (at around 0:10) with three components of sound—Steven’s guitar, Richard’s keyboard/synth layers, and Gavin’s drums—played in a 4/4 time signature at 110 BPM. First, there’s the presence of Steven’s guitar—played in a similar tuning as the title track—picking a rhythm in a tone that reminds me of something Johnny Greenwood would play in 1990’s Radiohead. It’s a rhythm that stays consistent, but jumps up and down a scale over the course of sixteen measures—somehow never feeling stale.
That feeling of constant freshness comes partly from Richard’s bright keyboard layers. But it’s a brightness that feels artificial on several fronts. For one, there’s the plinking of what sounds like a xylophone that emphasizes the false nature of what’s deemed ideal in the Blank Planet. That false nature’s further supported by the presence of synth pad sustains which sound right out of 80’s synth-rock. But the last layer of Richard’s—some piano notes strewn here-and-there—represent the bitter reality slowly creeping in and weakening the Blank Planet’s influence.
However, the driving force behind this portion of the song is undoubtedly Gavin’s tribal-sounding rhythm that he plays with only toms and kick-pedal. The level of control Gavin exercises in loud-to-soft dynamics with accents on his toms—often shifting from quiet to thunderous and back again in the span of a few notes—makes this section somewhat challenging to play on drums. That Gavin makes it sound effortless is a testament to his years of experience as a jazz drummer and to his overall skill as a drummer. Another great thing about Gavin’s drums is that just when you think you’ve got the pattern figured out, he throws in fills that seem random, but fit the flow of the song perfectly.
Colin may not play a single note for large chunks of the first movement, but that absence isn’t a wasted opportunity. In fact, Colin’s absence contributes greatly to the desensitized and lifeless quality of both the music and the lyrics As a result, picturing the inclusion of bass in sections where Colin doesn’t play is much like imagining Prince’s “When Doves Cry” with bass.
Even though the verse (starting at about 0:45) has no major instrumental differences from the intro, the way that Steven delivers the lyrics merits discussion. The words themselves feel elongated by the held-out manner which Steven sings them. Almost as if the boredom of social anesthesia has made time feel longer for the speaker. In which case, that’s foreshadowing for the implications of “follow their short life” lyric in the third movement.
Things take a different turn with the entry of the first chorus (at around 1:19). Right off the bat, listeners can tell that Colin’s now playing on bass—mainly sustains, but he’s playing exclusively within the higher registers in an eight-measure sequence. Gavin’s drums are the fundamental glue which holds this movement together, so it’s not different because the formula wasn’t broken to begin with. Richard delivers his usual layers of synth, but they now have an icy choral echo that makes this part of the song feel haunting. Especially in regards to the despair-laden cries of Steven’s voice and the reverb-laden chords that he strums.
Despite the second verse (beginning at about 1:54) mostly re-using the instrumental assets of the first verse, there’s one element which is unique to this verse. That element comes by way of a scratchy-sounding synth layer from Richard that comes in a barrage of sixteenth-notes. It’s not much of a stretch to assume that that sound represents information overload, the speaker’s world on the verge of collapse, possible migraines in the speaker, and/or a crisis in his life. Either way, it’s an unpleasant sound meant to represent something unpleasant to the speaker.
Although the second chorus (which starts at around 2:29) is identical to the first, the way it transitions into the next section is not. Rather than moving into another verse, the song jumps in volume for a heavy riff (at about 3:04) by using some assets—particularly a couple of Richard’s synth layers and Colin’s bassline—from the chorus as the tissue connecting the two sections. But the fact that this is a new section announces itself the moment Gavin smashes the song’s first crash-cymbal. Steven’s guitar contributes the majority of the new feelings elicited by this section. The instant the thunderous chord is strummed and allowed to ring out feels satisfying yet sinister, but the latter feeling prevails once the higher-register chromatic-scale pattern comes about. It’s a set of nine notes which never fail to make my hair stand on-end.
After two revolutions of that heavy riff, the song drops out to the intro pattern (at around 3:39). But Richard plays a delicate yet unnerving set of notes over it on what sounds like an electric piano. It’s an atmosphere not-far-removed from the previous section and a good transition into an even heavier riff (starts at about 3:56). This riff—a set of single notes and chords—feels like a genuine Sabbath riff.
Then (at around 4:13) we get to the song’s main guitar solo—played by a very special musical guest: Alex Lifeson of Rush. This managed to happen due to Alex being a long-time fan of PT and having asked for a guest spot on an album. Steven sent Alex (who was on-tour with Rush at the time) an audio file of the rhythm tracks for the section of “Anesthetize” that Steven wanted the solo to be placed. This left Alex to play an original guitar solo over the rhythm, record it, and send the results back to Steven and Company. Regardless of whether Alex was only able to hear the first part of “Anesthetize” or the whole song in what he was given, Alex turned in one of the finest guitar solos to appear on a Porcupine Tree album. He plays with a flair and a level of skill that exceeds Steven yet never feels over-stuffed with notes. Sections like the high-pitched sustains at about 4:50 end up spacing out the tension and make the flurry of notes which end the solo that much sweeter.
This whole matter also serves as a kick-in-the-arse for the rest of the band. Richard serves the most laid-back role by playing measure-long chordal sustains. Colin plays what seems like a basic scale on the higher registers of his bass, but the jazz-like tendency for improvisation means that it’s not as simple as it seems. Gavin’s the force that carries the rhythm section forward into the second movement. Like Colin, Gavin’s pattern seems simple on paper—three kick-pedals per measure, hi-hats every eighth-note, a snare on the fourth beat of every measure, and a snare on the sixteenth note just before the second beat of every measure. However, keep in mind that the kick-pedals aren’t equidistant to each other—they’re on the first beat, on the eighth-note between the second and third beats, and on the sixteenth note before the snare/hi-hat hit on the fourth beat. Something that can trip up a marching band, but nothing too challenging for seasoned musicians to imitate. But Gavin’s not done making this beat complicated—there’s still the matter of ghost-snares. In every sixteenth-note smacked between hi-hat hits placed between the first snare hit and the kick-pedal before the fourth beat, Gavin plays a ghost-snare while the other two snares (on the sixteenth note before the second beat and on the fourth beat) are accented. Furthermore, Gavin can use the last eighth-note beat of a measure in a number of ways that feel determined random. Such methods include a sixteenth not hi-hat followed by two (or four with or without the hi-hat) thirty-second note ghost snares placed just before the first beat of the next measure, two lightly-tapped sixteenth-note hi-hats, making the snare/hi-hat hit on the fourth beat an open hi-hat that’s left to ring out for a quarter note, a sequence of two sixteenth-note snares (one accented and one ghosted) followed by two sixteenth-note hi-hats, and placing an extra kick-pedal before a string of four thirty-second note ghost snares. The level of dexterity and control that Gavin exhibits on this section is something that won’t sound impressive to most listeners, but those that pays attention and knows what he’s playing have a sense of this being an incredibly-complex rhythm. And one that Gavin pulls off with such precision that he makes it look like entry-level drumming.
Alex Lifeson’s guitar solo marks a turning point in the song structure which proves critical as a transition between the first and second movements, as well as that of the second and third movements. There are a few musical and lyrical clues as to what occurs in these moments. One notable one being the contrast between Steven’s restrained singing in the first movement and his impassioned delivery of the second movement. Another cue comes from the energetic instrumentation of the second movement offering a musical representation of a drug trip that eventually comes to an abrupt halt before the third movement. Therefore, Alex’s guitar solo represents the speaker taking a large amount of pills whereas the moody transition between the second and third movements represents an emergency-room treatment of an accidental overdose.
II: “The Pills That I’ve Been Taking”
This section begins with a shift in rhythm pattern that happens exactly as Alex Lifeson hits the last sustained note of his guitar solo, which leads into a series of chugging rhythms that’ll be discussed in the music portion of this write-up.
After a while, there comes a more restrained and palm-muted variant of the chugging rhythm. This variant is played on both guitar and bass while Steven delivers the second section’s first verse:
The dust in my soul makes me feel the weight in my legs.
My head in the clouds and I’m zoning out.
I’m watching TV, but I find it hard to stay conscious.
I’m totally bored, but I can’t switch off.
The Alex Lifeson guitar solo which transitioned the first movement into the second represented the speaker ingesting a large amount of prescription pills. With this in mind, the first line of “The dust in my soul make me feel the weight in my legs” has a bit to pick apart. The more obvious part involves “the weight in my legs,” which are the effects of the pills starting to kick in. The part about “The dust in my soul” offers up a pretty neat metaphor not just for the pills, but for some of their effects. The pills are described as “dust” due to their tendency to clog the mind while their placement in the speaker’s “soul” indicates the desensitizing effect in the user.
The next three lines—“My head in the clouds and I’m zoning out/I’m watching TV, but I find it hard to stay conscious/I’m totally bored, but I can’t switch off”—escalate this further. The use of something as mundane as “TV” isn’t coincidental since it has the effect of being both boring and desensitizing, which “I’m totally bored, but I can’t switch off” enhances by robbing the speaker of sensory input from the real world. But as for “My head in the clouds,” that’s the most blatant indicator yet that the speaker’s in the middle of a pill trip. The meat-and-potatoes of the two lines comes from the contrast between “I’m zoning out” and “but I can’t switch off.” Such a contrast ends up resulting in a bizarre state of equilibrium between wanting to collapse and being unable to doze off. There’s a sense that the energy of the pills prevents him from dozing off, but that makes one wonder about the amount of pills that the speaker took. To which there’s the possibility that he took enough to end up overdosing, but the effects of such are slow-burning. In which case, the tolerance that the speaker’s built up to the pills results in an escalating in the amount of pills he takes in order to achieve the same high. Remember, unlike the speakers of the A and B paths, the speaker in “Anesthetize” takes pills as an addict.
In one of the heaviest choruses in the band’s discography, Steven delivers a pretty loaded set of lyrics:
Only apathy from the pills in me.
It’s all in me, all in you.
Electricity from the pills in me.
It’s all in me, all in you.
Only MTV, cult philosophy.
The line which starts this chorus off—“Only apathy from the pills in me”—registers on several fronts. First, “apathy” serves as an apt word to describe the numbing effect derived from a lack of sensation. However, quantifying that with the addition of “Only” results in a conclusion which probes into the speaker’s mind with utter clarity. That conclusion entails that “apathy” is the only state-of-mind which the speaker’s capable of feeling anymore. Since the speaker likely started abusing the pills in order to escape from apathy, the fact that his body’s built up enough tolerance to make it so that the pills render him more apathetic than ever means that there’s no way that the speaker can escape the bored state-of mind—a notion that’s no doubt torture to him. This constitutes another example of the hole suggested by the earlier line of “the curse of ‘there must be more.’”
As the only line in the chorus which occurs more than once, “It’s all in me, all in you” has to take on special significance. First, “It’s” functions as a reference to the apathy stemming from the pills which he once used to escape from apathetic feelings. Secondly, “all in me” isn’t stating that the apathy’s all in the speaker’s mind. Instead, that phrase entails that the apathy from the pills is how the speaker views everything around him because that’s the only feeling he has left. Thirdly, the use of both “me” and “you” feels apt for a chorus—even one with the unsettling implications that this one does. Apt because the lack of self-centeredness makes it so that “me” and “you” converge into “we,” rendering this chorus twistedly anthemic. Especially considering “we” had already been used in “Anesthetize” to suggest the speaker’s awareness of other people going through the same thing.
The third line of the chorus—“Electricity from the pills in me”—contains both lyrical and musical components to draw from. Lyrically, the use of the word “Electricity” conveys multiple things at once. First, the state of being energized—suggested by “Electricity” functioning as a power source for many appliances—parallels the state of feeling on-top-of-the-world while high on drugs. Another sense was that the “Electricity” originally came “from the pills in me” because of the apathy-dispelling effect of emotions. In this regard, the speaker’s addiction to pills came about because he needed them in order to feel any emotion. On a musical level, one only needs to look at the contrast between how the lyrics in the first movement were delivered and how the lyrics in the second movement are being delivered. In the former, there’s a lack of emotion in Steven’s voice whereas the “Electricity from the pills in me” results in the latter containing all the emotion which the speaker can muster.
The line which ends the chorus—“Only MTV, cult philosophy”—has a bit of confusion regarding one of the words. Some believe that Steven’s saying “COD” (as in “Call of Duty”) instead of “cult.” However, the version of the song found on the live DVD Anesthetize has Steven unmistakeably say “cult,” so that’s probably the official lyric. Regarding the meaning of that line, “Only” implies that “MTV” and “cult philosophy” are the only two things that elicit any emotion in the speaker’s life. Although “cult philosophy” refers to a mob-like mentality and not an actual cult, there’s a similarity in the conclusion raised by comparing it to modern MTV. Both are things where desensitization is required in order to believe them. Part of that desensitization involves an inability to think for oneself.
The vocals which Steven uses for the first couple of lines in this verse come across eerier than usual because they’re unaccompanied until the band enters for the third line:
We’re lost in the mall
Shuffling through the stores like zombies.
What is the point? What can money buy?
My hand’s on a gun and I find the range, God tempt me.
What did you say? Think I’m passing out.
That eerie quality of the first two lines makes sense given that this entire section of lyrics are a memory of the speaker’s which he’s remembering while overdosing. Apparently the ability to remember isn’t dulled even when the rest of the body is very much dulled. Regarding the lines themselves, “We’re lost in the mall/Shuffling through the stores like zombies” has a few details to pick out. The first—“We’re”—points out that the speaker’s talking about a group of people that’s probably sharing the same “cult philosophy” via being on the same pills and sharing the same sensations. As for “mall,” that ties into experiences of being “stoned in the mall” that the Path A and Path C speakers also experience (in “Fear of a Blank Planet” and “Sentimental”). The mall also involves “Shuffling through the stores” in a similarity to a near-identical phrase which appeared in “Fear of a Blank Planet.” In that case and this one, there’s a rebellion that’s conveyed in escalating extremity in order to express the self and fill the inner hole. The notion of that hole ever being filled gets undercut by the speaker describing the group as “zombies,” a word-choice implying that they’re dead inside regardless of whether they’re currently abusing pills or not.
Part of the reason for feeling dead inside comes from the futility entailed in the line “What is the point? What can money buy?” This futility serves as a commentary on the state of mental illness and on the ineffectiveness of the capitalist machine. The capitalist machine makes them think that they can buy the ability to feel happiness, but the fact that the mental illnesses which the speaker’s on this album are only treated with the pills, not cured. This stems from the fact that there’s no cure to mental illnesses such as depression and bipolar disorder. The intersection with the capitalist machine comes into play by considering that if such mental illnesses were cureable, drug companies would be losing a lot of money. So by not developing a cure, they manage to keep the money piling in. Due to all that, the best that the speaker and his group can buy with their money in their bored state are things that are as trivial as “What is the point?” leads one to believe.
That whole line discussed in the previous paragraph should be clarified in the context that there are some mental illnesses—autism being one of them—where the mental illness itself isn’t the determining factor as to whether it should be cured, but the severity. For instance, I’m mildly autistic and that’s led to me developing a strong academic bent that I’m not sure would’ve come about otherwise. However, I can’t deny that in cases of severe-and-profound autism that there’s (probably) more harm than good that their condition has given them. Whether a mental illness should be cured of an individual should be dependent on how negatively the mental illness affects that individual. It’s not a one-size-fits-all scenario, so if some opt for cures (if and when they ever get developed), they should be able to opt for them. By that same token, those who choose to refuse them—so long as it’s a condition that manageable for one to live with—should have the freedom to do so.
Returning to the song, the next line of this verse—“My hand’s on a gun and I find the range, God tempt me”—leaves no doubt as to the general idea of what’s going on—the speaker’s having a bout of suicidal thoughts while having a gun in his hand. The fact that the speaker’s having suicidal thoughts shows the intensity of suffering experienced by the anesthetized emotional state and really hits home how damaging that this condition is for a person’s psychological well-being. Another curious detail of this line comes from “God tempt me.” Just the way Steven says that gives one the impression that the speaker wishes that God would tempt him to pull the trigger, which conveys the speaker’s eagerness about leaving the Blank Planet. A possible takeaway from that phrase’s implication that the speaker doesn’t pull the trigger involves cowardice (or the speaker believing that he’s a coward).
Another takeaway comes from the events described in the last line of the verse: “What did you say? Think I’m passing out.” There’s some scene-picturing needed to get what’s going on with “What did you say?,” since it does suggest that the speaker’s friends see him with the gun held to his head. The thing which that line implies comes from the fact that the speaker’s friends are discouraging him from pulling the trigger, but the speaker can’t hear what they’re saying because the pills are tuning out the noise. Or more specifically, the pills are taking over him in a negative way. Which has further support from “Think I’m passing out” detailing that the speaker collapses (due to the pills) before he can pull the trigger of the gun held to his head. A conclusion that’s ascertainable from all that entails that the ironbound grip which the Blank Planet holds through the pills remains so strong that there’s little hope for escape. Any suicidal escape would come via the complete destruction of the self—something that this speaker doesn’t reach, but the speaker of another path does.
Coming off of the heels of Alex Lifeson’s excellent guitar solo, the song takes an abrupt shift into the second movement at around 5:07. At first, there are a few things noticeable to a careful listen that come across as rather curious. The first is Gavin’s temporary absence since there’s a drum loop of hi-hats. The second comes from the removal of Colin’s bass. However, Steven provides the antidote to that removal by way of a pulsing guitar figure—made up of a sustain, two descending sixteenth notes, two palm-muted sixteenth-notes, and an eighth-note rest—played in 5/8 and bounces between the speakers. However, the song’s still in a 4/4 time-signature. Meaning that like the band Meshuggah, this section of the song operates on a sequence of polyrhythms.
To further break down the math of this particular polyrhythmic sequence, keep in mind that the drum loop/Gavin’s drumming remains the anchor that still plays in 4/4. Additionally, two revolutions of Steven’s guitar figure add up to a 10/8 (or 5/4) pattern. Furthermore, four revolutions of 5/4 add up to 20/4 (or five measures of 4/4). Meaning that for every eight revolutions of Steven’s guitar pattern, the guitar and drum patterns meet up again—making for some order.
Soon after (at close to 5:15), Gavin re-emerges on live drums via a drum fill utilizing kick-pedal, snare, and three types of toms. This ends up leading to a drum rhythm that’s essentially marching-band snare-rolls broken up by intermittent kick-pedal hits and rapid fills on the toms—something executed with maddening complexity and made to look much easier than actually playing it is. This goes on for a while, but during that Steven’s polyrhythmic riffing continues as a general pulse. Additionally, Richard provides a smorgasbord of reverberating keyboards and wiry synths which color the section while Steven and Gavin continue to vamp about.
The vamp doesn’t last forever, but the song shifts to a rather heavy riff from Steven (at about 6:27). This time, Colin joins in on it with his bass. Instead, Richard drops out of this section. Gavin, however, switches to a standard-style hi-hat/snare/crash-cymbal beat with rampant thirty-second kick-pedal gallops and over-the-top drum fills. What carries over from the previous section is its metrical complexity. Since this section isn’t played in a Meshuggah-style polyrhythm, the instruments all play in the same time signature. However, that time signature shifts frequently. It starts in a measure of 5/8, goes to a measure of 6/8, then finishes in a measure of 8/8. That sequence plays a total of four times before moving to the next section. The rapid shifts in rhythm probably mark a disorienting feeling brought on by the pills ingested by the speaker.
Another polyrhythmic combination occupies the next section (starting at around 6:48). While the rhythm guitar (overdubbed by Steven), Colin’s bass, Richard’s choral synths, and Gavin’s powerhouse drumming all follow the 4/4 rhythmic pattern of the upcoming verses, Steven’s lead guitar does something different. As Steven plays higher-register chords in a rhythm that plucks four sixteenth notes, he’s also playing in a polyrhythmic manner that makes it meet up with the rest of the band once every four measures of 4/4. To break this down, Steven’s lead guitar figure has the a-chord strummed in a pattern of four sixteenth notes, then a half note rest. Do this two more times and it’s a time signature of 9/8. Then do the pattern twice (making this 6/8) for the b-chord before switching to the c-chord. In the c-chord, do the pattern four times, but instead of having a rest (making this 11/8) for the fourth time, play four strummings of d-chord, six of e-chord, then two palm-muted notes (6/8). All that—9/8 + 6/8 + 11/8 + 6/8—adds up to 32/8 (or 16/4). Which means that every four measures of this steely-sounding pattern, Steven’s lead guitar starts at the same spot as the rest of the band. This happens a total of four times in machine-like fashion before the verse begins.
Steven’s lead guitar drops out for the verse (which starts at about 7:23), making the entire band operate in a standard 4/4 time signature. Steven’s vocals in this bit illustrate the off-kilter quality of the music that matches the dire straits of the speaker. Richard contributes a pinging sound-effect on his synth that operates off-beat at intervals in the second half of the verse—almost like an alarm or a mechanism on the speaker’s person. As for Steven’s guitar and Colin’s bass, the two play in-sync with each other in a palm-muted set of low-end odd-rhythms. It goes (a) eighth-note, (b) three sixteenth-notes, (c) eighth-note, (d) dotted half-note, then (e) six sixteenth-notes. But the third sixteenth-note in the (b) sequence and the third and sixth sixteenth-note in the (e) sequence are two semi-tones higher in pitch than the rest of the notes.
Gavin’s drumming in this—and almost every section of the second movement—warrants extended discussion because it’s a masterclass in control, feel, and precision. The only elements of the beat that Gavin plays here that are regular come from the eighth-note hi-hats and the snares on the second and fourth beats. Other than that, it’s similar to the rhythmic madness that appeared during the Alex Lifeson solo (near)—ghost-notes galore on sixteenth-notes (and sometimes thirty-second notes at the end of a measure) and a kick-pedal rhythm that roughly follows the chugging pattern of the guitar and bass. Where it differs is when and where Gavin likes to change up the placement of the ghost-notes. An isolated drum track would be very helpful in determining all of them since the drum loop makes the sound of the hi-hats blend into that of the ghost-snares. The way in which Gavin transitions (at close to 7:57) into the first chorus comes in a lightning-fast blitz of snare, kick-pedal, and toms at thirty-second notes for a little over half of the last measure.
The second movement’s chorus (at around 7:58) arrives with two chords on Steven’s guitar—plus a slide going from one chord to the next as each rings for a full measure. Then, Steven strums around on some of the chords from the polyrhythmic lead pattern from earlier (close to 6:48) for a couple of measures. Meanwhile, Colin’s bass functions by delivering a counter-melody on the higher registers of his instrument. All the while, washed-out synth sustains from Richard invite a sense of gravitas to this chorus. The cherry on-top comes from Steven’s vocals—not heavily involved in range, but highly expressive.
Gavin’s main beat switches from the hi-hat to the ride-cymbal. While the on-beat accented snares remain unchanged (apart from measures where he accents off-beat snares), many of the notes that were ghost-snares in the verse are now played on kick-pedal. Furthermore, even when I put the song file into an audio editing software and listen to the song at about half-speed, I can’t make out every hidden cymbal or kick-pedal note that Gavin plays here because of how the notes tend to blend into one another. Probably deliberately given the title, but it’s another case where an isolated drum stem would be handy in making out exactly what Gavin’s playing here. All that I know is that it’s technically-complex and something which listening closer tends to fool the ear.
Following the first chorus, there’s a reprise (at about 8:20) of the second polyrhythmic pattern (the one that appeared near 6:27). After that, the second verse-chorus unit occurs and it’s just the same as the first—except for the part at the start of the second verse where it’s just Steven’s voice and the drum loop. So things really start to get interesting once the second chorus wraps up (at around 9:27). There, Colin plays a melodic bass solo involving arpeggios, string-skipping, and sustains in a scale-bound run for the next eight measures. During this, Steven plays a clean-toned guitar pattern which harmonizes with Colin’s bass solo by playing at an octave lower than Colin. All the while, Richard offers synths that evoke tones of a string section supporting this entire passage.
The parts which Gavin’s plays on his drumkit in this section operate on a similar mechanic here than in the verses. It seems like it comes with just eighth-note hi-hats with a smattering of kick-pedals and ghost-snares. But closer look reveals that Gavin continues to improvise where to employ off-beat kick-pedals and ghost-snares. And it’s even trickier to make out some of the hidden fills than usual due to the sound-mixing between the live drums and the drum loop.
The next section of the song (which starts at about 9:44) operates with the full band playing at some rather tricky time signatures. The crux of the matter is a four-measure sequence that goes 3/4, then 9/16, then 11/16, then 3/4 again. As for what’s being played, Steven plays a guitar riff consisting various chords—broken up by a three-note hammer-on sequence that’s punctuated by rhythmic chugging on the palm-muted C string. In the second (and last) revolution, Colin joins in on the fun and plays in perfect sync with Steven. Richard—on the other hand—drops completely out of these, letting Steven, Gavin, and Colin to have their time to shine.
Here marks the point of the song where Gavin goes ballistic on his drum-set. And best of all—every note is discernable with utter clarity. Every ghost-note, kick-pedal, tom fill, flam, crash-cymbal, hi-hat, ride-cymbal, and combination that Gavin employs with the enthusiasm of a kid in a candy-shop are front-and-center in the mix. It’s almost as if this section is a set of miniature drum solos for Gavin.
The jam section shifts (at around 10:08) back into a 4/4 time signature for a brief synth solo by Richard Barbieri. It’s a short-but-sweet display of his talents as a keyboardist more concerned with crafting effective and/or innovative atmospheres for the band. So in a way, a sustain-heavy and melodic solo for Richard makes sense and the wavy-sound of the synths suits this song rather well.
Regarding how everyone backs this solo, Gavin offers a variant of the chorus drum rhythm. Meanwhile, Steven rings out a suspended chord before resorting to picking out eighth-note arpeggios. Colin mostly follows suit with Steven, but plays two sustains in the space that Steven plays his one chord.
After the keys solo, there’s a reprise of the odd-time-signature-mini-drum-solo-jam for Gavin (at about 10:43). This gets followed up by a brief reappearance of the Meshuggah-esque rhythmic pulse of a riff (at roughly 11:07). Just after a brief break, Steven and Colin smacks listeners upside the head (at around 11:16) with the heaviest riff in the entire Porcupine Tree discography. If I get people telling me that Porcupine Tree can’t deliver heavy riffs, this is the first thing I show them to shut their mouths—and it hasn’t failed yet.
But just what are Steven and Colin playing that makes this riff so heavy and out-of-control? For starters, it’s the only riff in the song that’s an uninterrupted stream of sixteenth-notes—leaving the listener zero chance to breathe. The riff also cycles through three tonalities in rapid succession: one on the C string, one on the F string, and one on the A# string. Furthermore, the second and third tonalities are played as chords on Steven’s guitar—the third tonality’s never played by Colin. It’s a riff that—by design—operates on the principle of constant motion yet never ceases to be heavy. That’s proven even more-so by the fact that Richard sits this riff out and lets Steven and Colin have at it.
And if you thought that Gavin was playing an intricate drum part in this song before now, you haven’t seen anything. In this section alone, Gavin Harrison bashes three parts of his drumkit in three separate rhythms. To break this down, there’s the alternating crash-cymbal/ride-cymbal rhythm played every eighth-note. Then, there’s the snare hits delivered at every dotted half-note. Already, this is a polyrhythm entirely with Gavin’s hands which meets up once three-fourths of the way through a measure. But Gavin’s not done making this complex because there’s still the matter of what Gavin’s playing with his feet—a string of four thirty-second note kick-pedal hits placed just before every snare hit. The fact that the snares are played in a slightly-slower rhythm than the cymbals means that the first kick-pedal of the cluster won’t always start with a cymbal. Bottom line: for Gavin to play this with the level of proficiency that he’s playing at requires extreme limb independence in both his arms and his legs. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that this is the hardest part of the song to play on a drumkit.
That brute-force display of a riff leads into (at about 11:33) the second movement’s final chorus, followed by a reprise of the bass solo/guitar harmony section (at around 11:55). Finally, there’s a last bit of the all-too-familiar verse riff (at about 12:12) that abruptly cuts off, leading smoothly into the third movement.
III: “The Water So Warm That Day”
The third movement of the suite takes it’s time to enter, but it slowly blossoms into one of the most gorgeous-sounding and melancholy pieces of music that Porcupine Tree had ever put to tape. It’s definitely a breather after the heavy-metal assault of the second movement. But it’s one of the most emotionally-destroying parts of their discography.
The first lyrics which Steven utters in the third movement are those of the chorus, whose delivery is nothing short of sublime:
Water so warm that day (water so warm that day).
I counted out the waves (I counted out the waves).
As they broke into shore (as they broke into shore),
I smiled into the sun.
The purpose of the parentheticals relates to how this chorus sounds like while listening to it. Yes, the passages in parenthesis are backing vocals, but things get rather chaotic when there’s three separate layers of vocals overlapping each other. They don’t all sing simultaneously, but they each start about a beat apart from each other. While this appears like there’s so much going on vocally that it becomes difficult to make out who says what on a first listen, the way which the passage sounds evokes the image of waves washing over you.
As to what’s being said, there’s stuff to unpack. The first detail of note is the fact that there’s a giveaway in the line “Water so warm that day” via the word “warm.” Recall how in the first movement of the song, the speaker had been completely deprived of the ability to feel? That sensory deprivation has—in one word—been overcome via an active involvement in the beauty of nature. That success obviously means that the speaker’s quit taking pills, but that also means that a significant amount of time has passed between the second and third movements. This development exhibits a total 180 from the state which the speaker of the title track was in when the narrator observed “You feel no sun” since now, the speaker has embraced nature instead of the artificiality of “cult philosophy.”
The following line—“I counted out the waves”—has a hint in the past-tense “counted.” That hint implies that the waves symbolize memories—just like the ashes in “My Ashes.” However, that song led to the memories having a positive effect on the speaker. That’s not the case with the third movement of “Anesthetize.” Instead, the speaker’s left to stew over all his past regrets.
The third line—“As they broke into shore”—messes with that idea somewhat. Starting with “broke,” the mismatch between tenses has symbolic weight in that it represents the past giving way to the present in an abrupt manner. Another symbol comes from the crashing of the waves—a crashing and a fizzling-out mirrors the arc of the pills wearing off. From there, it’s not hard to state that the waves symbolize the lasting effects that the pills left on the speaker’s life. Additionally, the placement of this chorus before the events of the last verse function as a harbinger for the personal turmoil that’s right around the corner. Finally, the speaker’s use of “they” entails that these memories aren’t just his own, but those of other people with similar stories and endings as his own. A chilling thought given the omnipresence of the Blank Planet which set them up for failure.
In contrast to the doom-and-gloom of these first three lines (something which the verses support), the way the chorus ends—“I smiled into the sun”—emphasizes something different. To understand that difference, look at the action of “smiled” and notice how sharply that contrasts with the speaker’s deadened emotions in the first two movements. The passage of time between the second and third movements means that this isn’t and overnight change, but the fact that it’s happened at all indicates character development. The chorus does repeat after the final verses, which makes this line the last lyric in the song. The fact that a song with such devastating lyrics ends on a glimmer of hope isn’t insignificant. While the last verses are crushing, this final line suggests that the development that the speaker’s undergone can and will continue. That fact alone suggests that someday, all the emotional and physical turmoil felt in his life will lead to a happy ending. Steven gives just enough in the lyrics to imply that the speaker of this song has the greatest chance of escaping the clutches of the Blank Planet and surviving out of anyone on the album.
Almost without skipping a beat, this chorus transitions into the first verse. Steven delivers these lines with a sense of restraint:
The water so warm that day.
I was counting out the waves.
And I followed their short life
As they broke on the shoreline.
I could see you, but I couldn’t hear you.
The phrase “The water so warm that day” is now in the context of the main speaker as a first-person perspective, as the shifting tense relating to “I was counting out the waves” indicates.
The first original line of the verse—“And I followed their short life”—has a rather poetic image. Sure, that “followed” entails the speaker reflecting upon his past mistakes while counting out the waves ends up treading the same territory as “I counted out the waves” did back in the chorus. But this line expands upon that idea. Using the phrase “the short life,” these waves are no longer just a symbol for memory, but a metaphor for memory’s tendency to distort with the passage of time. Particularly in regards to the idea that life feels long while living it, but feels short when one looks back.
The next (and last) original line—“I could see you, but I couldn’t hear you”—fully reveals the nature of the situation. The “you” isn’t another aspect of the speaker, but another person. More fully, the phrase “I could see you” marks the instant where the speaker views a woman on the beach after the breaking of a particular wave. One can suggest that it happened suddenly enough that the speaker’s been caught off-guard. Additionally, the level of gravitas applied to this situation indicates that this woman is someone that the speaker has known for a long time and considers an important person in his life—someone he harbors feelings for, but has never been able to spit it out. However, the phrase “but I couldn’t hear you” entails that—despite the character development that occurred between the second and third movements—a full range of human sensations hasn’t quite returned yet.
The last lines of the verse have quite a lot of imagery and meanings to decipher for what seems like three unassuming lines. But these three lines are the most emotionally devastating in the entire song:
You were holding your hat in the breeze,
Turning away from me. In this moment,
You were stolen as black across the sun.
The way in which this verse begins—“You were holding your hat in the breeze”—seems quiet and unassuming enough since it’s an observation of the woman enjoying the summer breeze just like him. That unassuming quality gets disarmed upon considering that this woman’s likely never had the baggage that the speaker did, so her emotional and social development wasn’t stunted. In this regard, the joyousness which the woman’s expressing indicates that this is an image of what could’ve been if the speaker hadn’t resorted to pill abuse to fill the hole in his life. Instead, the pills ended up making the hole bigger. Something to stress about this situation is that while the speaker’s capable of feeling emotions (just like he is with sensory details), the length of time spent under social anesthesia has a lingering effect. That effect means that the speaker’s become so accustomed to a state of being unable to express emotions that he can’t tell her how he feels. That’s what makes the third movement of “Anesthetize” rather sad—that one lingering effect coming back to bite the speaker while he’s left to stew over what might have been if that effect had just gone away.
But it doesn’t, so the divide between a person’s state-of-mind and that of another doesn’t get bridged through language, the only way it can be bridged. Just look at the next line—“Turning away from me. In this moment”—which touches upon the failures of communication and the consequences that come about when the ability of expression gets stripped away. For instance, the woman’s action of “turning” is a voluntary one, but her unawareness of the speaker’s struggles and feelings leaves us—like the speaker—wondering if things would be different if he could express them. In all of this, the speaker recognizes—like the speaker of “Shesmovedon”—that exercising his power like a brute in order to try to get her to love him is wrong. Instead, from “away from me,” the speaker places the woman’s free-will above his own and respects her decision regardless of how much it devastates him. The phrase which follows—“In this moment”—doesn’t quite jive with the past-tense of the rest of the verse, but that inconsistency in tense emphasizes the passage of time in two respects. The first shows the distance between “this moment” and the overdose at the end of the second movement via implying that the overdose left some permanent effects on the speaker’s brain—it can sometimes jumble things up. The second respect relates to the fact that—for all this scene’s power—it’s conveyed in three brief lines. That respect ends up being utilized to show how suddenly things—even matters that a person considers highly important—can crumble.
The final new line of the song—“You were stolen as black across the sun”—marks one of the most vivid images that Steven’s every written in song. To begin with the word “stolen,” it’s important to emphasize that the speaker’s not cursing the woman who chose to turn away in the last line. Instead, the speaker’s cursing himself—specifically, the social failings stemming from the pill abuse of the first two movements. One gets the sense that the speaker believes that had those social failings not existed (of if he resolved them in a healthier way than pill abuse), this situation would’ve ended differently.
However, it’s the “black across the sun” phrase which makes up the meat-and-potatoes of this line’s power. Ironically, it’s also the phrase where Steven wears influences on his sleeve. Since there’s similarities both to “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden (1994) and the line “I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky” from the end of “Paint It Black” by The Rolling Stones (1965). I doubt that Steven did this on purpose since the context—although similar to the latter in that depression’s involved—results in Steven making this image into his own. In essence, the image evokes that of a total eclipse—an event which lowers the temperature—or the apocalypse. The latter feels more probable since, to the speaker’s perspective, this is an apocalyptic event to his emotional state. Namely because any promise of a future with someone he valued highly has been extinguished—just like the light of the sun. Although the previous line of the song suggests that the speaker lets this whole thing go, this image entails that that doesn’t mean he has to like doing so. It’s at this exact point where the speaker realizes the full extent of the devastation that the effects of his former pill abuse wrought on him. I can just picture him face-down in the sand crying and slamming his fists down as he stews about his mistake. But even the ability to cry at all is arguably an improvement from the emotional numbness from before.
Regarding the third movement’s musical palate, Richard carries off exactly where the second movement ended (at around 12:20). The set of synth effects on display in this long section mark something I’ll refer to as ‘moody pulses’ because that describes the tone and the rhythmic feel of Richard’s main synth pattern. But that’s not the only bit of sonic detail here—far from it. There’s new aspect of synth effects in this section that I hear every time I listen to the song. For instance, there’s the sound of waves cresting-and-crashing that resemble the motion of an EEG and set the scene for what occurs in the third movement—a clever way for the song to smoothly transition from one moment to another. Another scene setting detail comes from a synth effect which sounds like a moaning animal—either the internal screams of the speaker, a sound of an animal on the beach in the third movement, or both. Seriously, the feeling that Richard evokes here are a master-class of ambience and a crowning display as to why his presence is an indispensable part of the Porcupine Tree equation.
The massive bit of ambience from Richard lasts for a little over forty seconds—long enough for you to ease into the effects of the synths. And certainly long enough for the arrival of Steven’s clean-toned guitar (at about 13:04) to provide an effect similar to David Gilmour’s immortal four-note sequence in Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” In the cases of both songs, the shimmering guitar patterns raises the music outside of a seemingly-formless mass—dominated by keyboard—which marked chaos that represented the darkest depths of the speakers’ lives: the loss of Syd Barrett for “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and the emergency stomach-pumping post-overdose for “Anesthetize.” Where “Anesthetize” differs is the way that Steven’s guitar vamps between two keys in a fashion which practically cries out melancholy. Indeed, melancholy comes from the entire third movement and the guitar pattern introduces that mood—something which the lyrics would raise to a fever pitch.
After a couple of revolutions of that guitar pattern, Colin arrives with a fat-sounding bass fill. This fill immediately leads into order’s entry in the song via the band’s arrival (at around 13:20). For a couple of revolutions, everything falls into place and the listener can luxuriate in the vast sound that Colin, Steven, Richard, and Gavin are creating. Steven’s shimmering guitar remains unchanged, so that’d be redundant to address again. Richard’s keyboard now has layers of plinking piano electric piano which adds to the atmosphere. Colin’s bass has sustains keeping things tight for a measure at a time, but the mellower sound allows the notes to be heard more crisply than in the second movement. Gavin keeps his drum rhythms relatively laid-back compared to the off-the-wall patterns of the second movement: it’s just a ride-cymbal, kick-pedal, and snare beat here—apart from some marching-band snare-rolls.
All of that serves as the primary instrumental backing for the chorus (at about 13:39). However, the manner in which Steven executes this chorus is unlike anything else in the Porcupine Tree catalog. Steven has used the magic of overdubs to a Queen-esque effect before, but nothing quite like this. Here, Steven’s overlapping of three layers of vocals—where one starts off, another starts while the other one’s going, and a third goes while the second one’s half-way done with a line—is effectively a canon being performed with just the voices. In the history of rock music, there are only two other examples of a canon (itself a technique usually reserved for classical music) being performed by the voice. Unsurprisingly, both examples are in Queen songs. The first example is in the “Magnifico” phrase during the opera section of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The second example comes in the a-capella section in the middle of “The Prophet’s Song.”
As hinted at in my lyrics write-up, the sound of the vocal canon chorus here evokes waves washing across the beach that the speaker’s located in this movement. The general movement in pitch that Steven sings these lines also suggests that a decline or a disaster’s about to happen—all the pill abuse of the speaker’s past culminated in this moment. This whole thing sounds utterly hypnotic even considering Steven’s relatively-thin vocal range.
The lone verse of this movement (starting at around 14:40) employs the instrumentation of the chorus, but the layers of keyboard from Richard are dialed-back so that the electric piano flourishes are all that’s left. What this allows for the sound is a sense of restraint. Whereas the chorus utilizes a bombastic vocal canon to convey overwhelming despair, the singular voice of this verse makes such despair feel more intimate and hit harder. Especially the “black across the sun bit,” where Steven’s voice conveys utter hopelessness.
While the movement’s verse does lead into a second chorus (at about 15:32), the instrumentation and delivery are—apart from some differing flourishes on guitar and keys—identical to that of the first chorus. But the clean-toned guitar solo that comes afterwards (at around 16:29) isn’t a repeated aspect of the song. Backed by Colin’s scale-bound sustains, Richard’s airy synths, and Gavin’s ever-dependent drumming, Steven embarks on a solo that’s nothing short of beautiful. It may be simple to play (especially compared to Alex Lifeson’s guitar solo from earlier), but it’s the musical embodiment of the crying that the speaker’s experiencing following his own inability to emote.
And the very last chord of Steven’s guitar solo rings out (at about 17:08) in a tone that’s both natural and machine-like. But the song’s not quite done. Even though everyone drops out except for Richard, the ambient maestro still remains. The mood-setting sustains sound similar to those which transitioned the second movement into the third, but now they’re alone. The effect is utterly haunting and suggests that the song’s speaker might not recover after all, but the progress the speaker made makes that ambiguous.
Regardless of what anyone says, “Anesthetize” will go down as one of Steven Wilson’s greatest achievements as a musician, songwriter, and lyricist. The only reason it’s not his de-facto masterpiece is that with a solo career that’s spawned incredible pieces of music like “Harmony Korine,” “Postcard,” “Deform To Form A Star,” “Raider II,” “Remainder The Black Dog,” “Luminol,” “The Raven That Refused To Sing,” nearly all of Hand. Cannot. Erase., “Detonation” and “Refuge,” Steven’s exhibited that he’s always growing as a musician. Despite most artists hitting a creative peak in their twenties (including The Beatles), Steven’s hit 50 this past November and arguably yet to hit a peak. Meaning that he could very well write something in the future which exceeds “Anesthetize” in all possible respects.
But this eighteen-minute masterpiece remains the finest song Porcupine Tree ever recorded. Fittingly, it marks the culmination of every sonic texture that Steven explored with this band since the Up The Downstair days. And it did so with a compositional brilliance that—in my mind—Steven has equaled a handful of times in his solo career, but never bettered. Part of that comes from the sheer synchronicity of every member of the band. Given that Gavin joined in 2000 while Colin and Richard joined in 1994, they had more time to know the ins-and-outs of what made each band member tick. And Porcupine Tree never played off of each other better than on “Anesthetize,” something owed to the years of experience playing together. Since Steven’s usually employed session musicians (albeit highly-talented session musicians) on his solo albums, some of the crackling energy of musician interplay is lacking where it really shouldn’t (in comparison to “Anesthetize”). Part of what makes The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories) and Hand. Cannot. Erase. awesome was that those two albums had Steven use his live band at the time. Their absence was most definitely missed on To The Bone.
However, a strict focus on the music alone dismisses the power of this song’s lyrics. While “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here” and “The Raven That Refused To Sing” are both better-written sets of lyrics, “Anesthetize” remains Steven’s set of lyrics which hit the hardest raw nerve for me. This is due to the third movement, which has extremely personal connections to me and reminds me of an emotionally-dark period of my life. For me, it wasn’t pill abuse. But there were times that—as a mild autistic affected by social disorders—the inability to connect with people remained something all-too-real. Where the ‘addiction’ came on my plate was—at the time I first listened to the song—a feeling like I bothered people or emotionally hurt others without meaning to. Which led to a temporary self-imposed isolation because I felt it was better to hurt myself that way than hurt others. Then, this song came on and even if I didn’t know the full extent of what Steven put into the lyrics, part of me felt the meaning of every word. So much so that when the third movement came about, part of me felt like saying “Steven, this is getting a little too close to home.” On the plus side, I’ve grown in the years since first hearing this song. But there’s always the possibility of a relapse of isolation. As long as that possibility exists, the third movement of “Anesthetize” will serve as a potent warning to never sink as low as I did at my lowest point.
I love this song and could probably go on for so much longer on just “Anesthetize.” But it’s time to move forward. Just do yourself a favor and listen to this song. Preferably the whole album. But “Anesthetize” was a wise decision for the album’s centerpiece. Every theme and idea from the rest of the songs on Fear of a Blank Planet remains touched upon and fully-developed to a musical and lyrical zenith. No other song defines the core of the album better than “Anesthetize,” the greatest song that Steven Wilson wrote during his Porcupine Tree years.
“Sentimental” (5:26)
Curiously, “Sentimental” has several parallels to a song called “Normal” (which later saw official release as part of Nil Recurring). Most tellingly, both songs share the same chorus. However, “Sentimental” differs from “Normal” in quite a few ways beyond the fact of differing song lengths (“Normal” crosses the seven-minute mark). First and foremost, the standout instrument in “Sentimental” is Steven’s (not Richard’s) piano part while “Normal” grabs a listener’s attention with some of Steven’s best acoustic guitar playing (acoustic arpeggios aplenty). Next, “Normal” has sections of tenser guitar and drumwork than anything in “Sentimental.” Additionally, “Sentimental” expertly blends sounds from multiple genres (prog, ambient, electronic, pop, and rock) and unites them into a cohesive whole—something which contrasts with the predominantly folk-based sound of “Normal.” Finally, “Sentimental” isn’t above utilizing meta-references to another moment in the Porcupine Tree discography (as will be seen in the song’s outro) whereas “Normal” remains standalone.
Musically, “Sentimental” is only rivaled by “My Ashes” as the most relaxed song on Fear of a Blank Planet. Indeed, this song would’ve been another great choice for a single since the seamless blend of several genres of music doesn’t end up making the song inaccessible to new audiences. That Steven managed such a feat exhibits continued growth as a songwriter and as a musician. But the song isn’t happy like “My Ashes” can be read as—and that’s a trait which the melancholy-sounding music reflects.
Lyrically, “Sentimental” appears to occur after “My Ashes” and a significant amount of time has passed between the two songs. While one can entail that the events of “Anesthetize” occurred between the two songs, “Anesthetize” itself has enough to form a self-contained story. As for where the Path B speaker is at, “Sentimental” places him on the cusp of an adulthood which he is woefully ill-prepared for.
Regarding the lyrics themselves, Steven’s word choice in the first verse warrants examination:
I never wanna be old
And I don’t want dependents.
It’s no fun to be told
That you can’t blame your parents anymore.
I’m finding it hard to hang from a star.
I don’t wanna be…
Never wanna be old.
The opening two lines of the song—“I never wanna be old/And I don’t want dependents”—paint a clear portrait of what point of life that the speaker’s at. Right from “I never wanna be old,” the speaker’s right on the cusp of adulthood. While there’s the notion of a rite of passage, that doesn’t apply for the speaker since he’s dreading it. That dread’s evident with “don’t want dependents” since the speaker knows that adulthood means that he’s on his own from here-on-out. And frankly, he knows from his self-destructive habits that he can’t last all alone and he can’t adapt.
The conclusions of that line are expanded upon with the lines that follow: “It’s no fun to be told/That you can’t blame your parents anymore.” If there is one privilege that comes with being a minor, then it’s the ability to “blame your parents” for your mistakes. Granted, that’s an irresponsible thing to do, but a minor can get away with that. That irresponsible quality and the ability to get away with it provides one example of how the Blank Planet leaves teens like the speaker ill-prepared yet remains content with stripping them of any chance for a successful transition into adulthood.
Deep down, the speaker knows about all that. The line which follows that one—“I’m finding it hard to hang from a star”—says as much. The “star” symbolizes the childhood dreams and ambitions which the speaker had in “My Ashes.” As for why the speaker’s hanging from the star, that’s an image with two layers of meaning. That depends on whether “hang” refers to the speaker holding a rope with his hand or to a rope around the speaker’s neck. If it’s the former, than he’s hanging onto his dreams by a thread just above the dark reality that’s on the verge of swallowing him up. If it’s the latter, than the action of holding onto dreams killed the speaker’s chances of adjusting to reality.
But even this isn’t certain, since the incomplete thought of “I don’t wanna be…” implies that he’s begrudgingly accepted that his dreams are going to die as long as he stays alive. Under this logic, it’s possible to read the second use of “Never wanna be old” as the speaker’s first documented contemplation of suicide. More specifically, it’s an acknowledgement that suicide might be the only way to succeed at never being old. Regardless, the speaker’s dreams will die—either by his own death or by the cynical way of the world.
As mentioned prior, this chorus uses the same words as the chorus in “Normal.” However, the differing contexts of the two songs imbue the use of these words in “Sentimental” with a moodier meaning than in “Normal.” The chorus which Steven sings reads as follows:
Sullen and bored the kids stay
And in this way wish away each day.
Stoned in the mall the kids play
And in this way wish away each day.
This chorus is the exact same as a song PT worked on in this period called “Normal” (released through the Nil Recurring EP), but the context of this song is different from that of “Normal.” While “Normal” placed the speaker as a kid who “in this way wish away each day,” the melancholy tone of “Sentimental” changes the perspective. Now, the speaker’s an observer. This means that the kids who spend each day “Stoned in the mall,” “Sullen and bored,” and wishing “away each day” are doing the same exact thing that the speaker once did. That’s wanting to grow older as quickly as possible. What makes this wrenching is that the speaker’s at a position where he can feel adulthood’s sting creeping up, but isn’t entrenched enough in ‘adulting’ to properly articulate what it means. But the speaker knows that adulthood is rife with pain. Especially on a Blank Planet.
For what makes “Sentimental” an outright depressing song instead of just a moody one, look no further than the words Steven uses for the second verse—one of the more powerful ones on the album:
I don’t really know
If I care what is normal.
And I’m not really sure
If the pills I’ve been taking are helping.
I’m wasting my life,
Hurting inside.
I don’t really know
And I’m not really sure.
The uncertainty conveyed in the lines “I don’t really know/If I care what is normal” registers as concerning for a specific reason. That specific reason being that the uncertainty of those lines takes the apathy of the emotional numbness to a new height. The new height in question places the speaker on the verge of a mental breakdown. Given how thoroughly “Sentimental” conveys a sense of complete decline in the speaker, that interpretation of these two lines isn’t something that should be written off
That aforementioned breakdown bleeds into the conceit of the lines “And I’m not really sure/If the pills I’ve been taking are helping.” The conceit leads one to the idea that the speaker’s defenses are slowly getting chipped away one-by-one. As for what’s being defended against, that’s the enormity of adulthood’s bitterness. One such lack of defense ascertainable from “not really sure” indicates that the ineffective pills may still serve the purpose of a placebo. But that ineffective quality means that the speaker’s lack of a safety-net going into adulthood only appears more blatant than before.
All of that culminates with “I’m wasting my life,/Hurting inside.” These two lines convey a sense of worthlessness and self-hatred so intense that the speaker feels internal pain from it. That worthlessness stems from the speaker’s numbed emotions, inability to function in the world, and blaming himself for how maladjusted he is for adulthood. The “wasting my life” portion of lyrics hit me like a ton of bricks during the dark time of my life that I mentioned towards the end of my “Anesthetize” write-up—a time where I felt like any social interaction was for nothing yet doing the opposite was a waste of life.
The lack of an easy answer in this situation proves maddening in the “I don’t really know/And I’m not really sure” lines. The reality of the situation means that there’s no way to be certain about anything. Unfortunately, that’s not going to put the speaker’s mind at ease. In fact, because the speaker wants to get out of this mess, the acknowledgment of disorder proves torturous to his mind. However, order’s a crutch in this situation because any solution must come through disorder. If a solution could come through order, it’d have happened already.
“Sentimental” begins (at around 0:10) with a rather tricky time signature (15/16) played on piano. And for once, Richard isn’t playing the piano (he does play synths) on this song. Instead, the piano in this song—the song’s driving force—is played by Steven. It’s a piano part centered on four chords, but it evokes a melancholic sense in the minor-key chord progression. The song’s alone with just the piano for a while, but soon comes (at about 0:32) a sequence of programmed drums. Or at least a set of drums which have a machine-like filter over them. Since it’s a pattern of hi-hats, kick-pedal, and snare which has ample snare-rolls for it to be Gavin actually playing the drums. Anyways, this instrumentation runs all the way through the first verse (starting at around 0:55). Which just leaves Steven’s desolate-sounding vocals to complete the puzzle.
Once the chorus kicks in (at about 1:33), the song moves to a 4/4 time signature and both Colin’s bass and Steven’s guitar enter the song. Colin’s bass in almost the entire song is nothing special—just basic sustains in line with the chord changes. Steven’s guitar plays a flanger-tinged pattern which has a tendency to fade in-and-out of the mix. Meanwhile, Gavin begins to add tom patterns into the main beat. The song’s piano—played by Steven—remains the star of the show by vamping in a completely-different pattern than before. This time, it’s a sequence of chords which allow Steven to have jazz-esque improvisational flourishes which end up livening up the song. That characteristic only increases in the vamp of the chorus rhythm between the first chorus and the second verse (at around 1:55)—a sequence where the dominant sounds are piano chords and Richard’s airy synths in a combination that sounds bombastic.
Verse two of the song (introduced at about 2:17) follows the template of the first, but now a whirring set of synth sustains by Richard cast a smokescreen over Steven’s piano rhythm. Appropriate given that this part contains the song’s most poignant lyrics. But the second chorus (at around 2:56) marks the point where the song kicks into high-gear. Everything from the first chorus remains intact, but now there’s live drums from Gavin instead of the machine-esque rhythm that’s played up until now. And that makes all the difference because Gavin’s drumming has a propulsive, energetic quality which a drum machine can’t quite match.
Anyways, after the second chorus goes around once, leads to more piano goodness from Steven, and into a repeat of the chorus, the song shifts again. This time, there’s an unexpected musical homage (at about 4:02) to the main guitar pattern of “Trains” being played on piano, guitar, and bass as Gavin lays down a steady rhythm. This motif is thematically appropriate in the context of the album since the first line of “Way Out of Here” (the next song on Fear of a Blank Planet) mentions trains as a means of escape. As to what the purpose of that escape is, stay tuned. Meanwhile, this “Trains” homage serves as the accompaniment for a pretty nifty acoustic guitar solo (at around 4:23) from Steven that’s short-but-sweet. After that, the song crashes out (at about 4:35) to where it’s just Steven’s piano pattern from the intro supporting Steven’s voice repeating the chorus as both slowly grow quieter. Not quite a fade-out since Richard’s synths start to drown out the mix, but power does diminish in a rather relaxing way for this song to end.
The heightened sense of melancholy in “Sentimental,” the song’s lyrics painting a speaker on the verge of collapse, and the laid-back-yet-not-completely-calm instrumentation all converge to make the song into something magical. Inside or outside the context of the album, “Sentimental” has a frightening power to resonate with listeners in a similar way to Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.” Appropriately, the two songs aren’t too far-removed in theme—only that “Sentimental” has darker shades that the context of Fear of a Blank Planet places it in more vivid detail than Alice Cooper’s breakthrough 1971 hit.
This is a wrenching, melancholy, genius, and oddly-beautiful song. That “Sentimental” isn’t the greatest song on the album provides a strong indicator of Steven’s songwriting strengths and of Fear of a Blank Planet possibly serving as the band’s most-consistent album.
“Way Out of Here” (7:37)
Following the reprise of “Trains” which occurs at the end of “Sentimental,” the album takes a turn from the melancholy into the outright dark for the last two tracks. That dark turn takes full effect with “Way Out of Here,” a song which accomplishes several things on a musical and a lyrical level. To get the elephant out of the room immediately, “Way Out of Here” involves the Path B speaker making the decision to commit suicide, but the song doesn’t involve the suicide itself—just the decision. Musically, “Way Out of Here” runs the sonic gamut by including a disarmingly-quiet intro, a chorus with punk-like aggression, a second verse which has some of Gavin’s most complex drumming, a middle section that involves multiple layers of ambient clean-toned guitars, a maddeningly-difficult drum solo by Gavin that’s backed by one of Steven’s most aggressive riffs, and an outro that blends bits and pieces from several other parts of the song. In that regard, “Way Out of Here” comes off as an odd pick for the album’s second single. Odd because of similar reasons to that which made the title track an unorthodox choice for the lead single.
The opening lines of the song are delivered by Steven in a way that indicates that something’s very wrong—they’re sung quietly, but almost too quietly:
Out at the train tracks, I dream of escape.
But a song comes onto my iPod
And I realize it’s getting late.
When looking at the opening line of “Out at the train tracks, I dream of escape,” one has to consider the ever-present imagery of trains as a symbol for a constant movement to the future (something which recent Instagram posts have indicated that Steven himself is aware of). That symbolism—carrying off of the reprise of “Trains” at the end of “Sentimental”—isn’t as optimistic as how it was used in earlier songs such as “Trains.” Instead, look at the use of the words “train tracks,” consider that that location’s a frequent stand-in for places where people commit suicide, and then draw the conclusion that “escape” means suicide. That he dreams “of escape” means that it’s an escalation of the “I don’t wanna be…/Never wanna be old” lines from “Sentimental.”
To some listeners, the mention of a specific piece of technology in the line “But a song comes onto my iPod” comes across as dooming the song to being dated. There’s more to it than that. A major takeaway presents itself via the contrast between “song” and “iPod.” With “song,” there’s the connection to music, a naturally-occurring art/form of human expression dating back (at least) to African tribal forms—and that’s not counting the forms of music unknown to us because they’re lost to the sands of time. To contrast, what “iPod” represents is the artificialization of all that in a mode that furthers the tech-based dehumanization of the Blank Planet. Additionally, Steven—until fairly recently—held pretty negative views towards digital avenues of music. But he had the most vitriol towards iPods—going so far as to film himself (on the DVD that came with the special edition of his debut solo album Insurgentes) destroying iPods in various ways. Including making them targets for skeet shooting (I should stress that Steven doesn’t strike me as pro-gun), lighting them on-fire, smashing two of them with a hammer, and running them over with a car. Once he started trying to court mainstream success with To The Bone, his views softened in that he doesn’t necessarily like digital avenues of music, but finds them a necessary evil.
That dehumanization carries real consequences within the line “And I realize it’s getting late.” The way the line’s worded uses some coded language, but the general idea in applying this to the dehumanization is that the speaker’s thought process marks the end-result of long-term dehumanization. In that, there’s a progression entailed by “realize.” That one word marks the speaker becoming consciously aware of what he was unconsciously aware of with the “Never wanna be old line” from “Sentimental”—suicide is the only way that the speaker will avoid the cruelties of an adulthood that the world didn’t prepare him for. That suicidal decision indicates that “it’s getting late” can mean one of two things: getting too close to adulthood or getting high-time to commit suicide. The speaker’s effectively standing at a crossroads between accepting adulthood and committing suicide.
But the second part of the first verse warrants a look on its own:
I can’t take the staring and the sympathy.
And I don’t like the questions.
“How do you feel?”
“How’s it going in school?”
And “Do you wanna talk about it?”
At various points of the album, there have already been hints of the mechanisms behind the lines “I can’t take the staring and the sympathy/And I don’t like the questions.” In those hints and this clear-cut example, those mechanisms all center on parents or authority figures. The reason that “the staring” and “sympathy” galls the speaker so much stems from the fact that they’re a smokescreen that doesn’t solve or address the Blank Planet system at the root of the problem. That parents can get away with such things and remain as blissfully ignorant of the problems plaguing their children as “the questions” make them out to be suggests that the Blank Planet system benefits adults far more than it does children.
After a build-up, Steven arrives and bellows this chorus with what seems like all the air in his lungs:
Way out. Way out of here.
Fade out. Fade out, vanish.
That bellowing means that these lines are the moment that—without any doubt—the speaker’s made up his mind that he’s going to kill himself. As for what these lines mean, “Way out. Way out of here” paints suicide as a form of escapism—at least in the mind of the speaker. That escapism creates links to the connotations of the “And shoplifting is getting so last year’s thing” line from the title track and the “My hand’s on a gun and I find the range, God tempt me” line from “Anesthetize.” In the case of the line from the title track, the escalation of what’s ‘extreme’ enough to constitute as rebellion has led to suicide becoming the ultimate repudiation of the Blank Planet—once it’s done, there’s no way the grip of the Blank Planet can reach you. While that can come across as a glorification of suicide, the “Anesthetize” comparison brings things back to earth by pointing out the stakes of such an act as well as showing that that form of repudiation’s no simple task.
The wording of the line that follows—“Fade out. Fade out, vanish”—contains a tie to an earlier song from Steven’s career. It’s not too much of a stretch to associate “Fade out” with the “Did you ever imagine the last thing you hear as you’re fading out was a song” line from “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here.” Especially considering that death’s involved in the context of both songs. But this line cinches that the speaker’s dead-set in a belief that suicide is the only escape from the Blank Planet.
Without skipping a beat, the song transitions from the first chorus into the second verse. This second verse contains some of Steven’s most haunting lines on the album:
And I’m trying to forget you and I know that I will
In a thousand years or maybe a week.
Burn all your pictures, cut out your face.
The shutters are down and the curtains are closed
And I’ve covered my tracks, disposed of the car.
And I’ll try to forget even your name
And the way that you look when you’re sleeping,
Dreaming of this.
The manner which this verse begins—“And I’m trying to forget you and I know that I will/In a thousand years or maybe a week”—sets a couple of ambiguities in place. First, “you” may pertain to the speaker chastising his own identity or it may pertain to the other person in “Sleep Together.” Another ambiguity comes from the “or” in “In a thousand years or maybe a week.” This ambiguity undercuts the confident tone of “I know that I will” since it creates a sense of indecision. However, since the speaker’s already decided that he’s going to kill himself, that indecision may just serve as the ultimate decision. Sure, he doesn’t know when he’s going to kill himself, but he definitely knows that he’ll stay dead once the deed’s done.
A particularly haunting line comes from “Burn all your pictures, cut out your face” and its connection to the song’s music video—which involves a girl doing this to photos of herself. That image tells the listener that the speaker hates himself more than anything else. And that’s regardless of all the scorn that he heaps upon his parents. The implication from that being that even if/when the speaker kills himself, the Blank Planet has already won by breaking his spirit.
The entire motif of self-hatred gets escalated with the next lines: “The shutters are down and the curtains are closed/” The imagery detailing that the “shutters are down” and the “curtains are closed” suggest that the speaker thinks that no one will find his corpse. This indicates such a degree of self-loathing that he believes that he’s not worth being remembered by anyone.
That very idea runs through one of the most—if not the most—devastating line in the song: “And I’ve covered my tracks, disposed of the car.” In conjunction with the imagery of “cut out your face,” it’s clear that the speaker doesn’t just want to die, but a mix of damnatio memorae (see the “Leave no trace/All my files erased” lines in “Sleep Together”) and a Joyce Carol Vincent scenario. The latter—the inspiration for Steven’s solo album Hand. Cannot. Erase.—was a British woman who lived alone, died in her apartment wrapping Christmas gifts on Christmas Eve, and had no one discover her body for almost three years. Unlike Joyce Carol Vincent, the speaker doesn’t want to be found and decides to actively destroy anything which could remind anyone of him. So it’s arguably worse than Joyce Carol Vincent because she was eventually found.
This active destruction of evidence of existence transitions into the points raised by “And I’ll try to forget even your name/And the way that you look when you’re sleeping,/Dreaming of this.” One thing to recall regarding the “your” is that it’s not ambiguous like the one earlier in this verse—the “your” marks the speaker’s own identity. By separating the physical body from the projection of the self, the speaker engages in an ‘othering’ of the self. That the speaker states that he’ll “try” this leaves some doubt whether he’ll succeed. But regardless, it’s clear that the speaker doesn’t want to remember his own personality or what he looks like because it’s easier to kill what one doesn’t understand.
“Way Out of Here” begins (at around 0:04) in a sequence played in a 3/4 time signature at 115 BPM. But the part that catches the ear about this intro—consisting of muted rhythm guitar from Steven and soundscape sustains from Richard, Colin, and guest Robert Fripp (leader/guitarist of King Crimson)—isn’t the notes of the music itself. Instead, it’s how quiet the song is. That lets you know—along with how Steven sings in this quiet—that something’s wrong. It’s not just that it’s quiet—it’s too quiet.
However, the second half of the first verse (at about 1:02) adds a sliver of life to the instrumentation. By way of a four-note acoustic pattern that undergoes some key changes, the song’s now imbued with one element of warmth. Additional elements come once Gavin enters (at around 1:27) and shifts the time signature to 6/4 with a rhythm that heavily utilizes ghost-snares. Meanwhile, the acoustic pattern of Steven’s and Richard’s synths are building up in both volume and intensity.
Until it all boils to a fever-pitch when the chorus arrives (at about 1:53). Not only are the lyrics to this chorus a full-on cry of despair, but the instrumentation (aside from Richard’s water-tight synthesizers) evokes full-on heavy-metal in ways that nothing outside of “Anesthetize” and the title track out-heavy on the album. It’s partly the punk-like vigor which Steven and Colin play on guitar and bass. And it’s partly the energetic, ride-cymbal-centric, fill-laden drumline from Gavin. Regardless, this chorus is one of the album’s most energetic.
That energy ends up smacking the listener once the second verse rolls around (at around 2:19) and reminds people that this song’s about preparing one’s own suicide. Not a happy topic and, appropriately, this section redirects the energy from the chorus into dread. Not only does that ring true with the lyrics, but also the instrumentation. First, there’s the moody synths of Richard faintly playing. Then, there’s the pulse of Colin’s high-register stop-and-start bassline which immediately catches the ear. The most-unnerving part are the clean-toned droning minor-key sustains played by Steven’s guitar that start each measure.
Verse two also provides another moment where Gavin’s drumming warrants special mention. Using a foundation of hi-hat, snare, and kick-pedal, Gavin expands on that formula here. There’s ghost snares, wood-block, and various toms being deployed by Gavin in frantic sixteenth-note rhythms. Most of which involve him going around the kit like an octopus. This section’s delivering one of the most technical parts of the whole album and also ratchets up the tension in an already-tense verse.
Just as the tension can’t seem to go on any further, the song jumps back into the chorus (at about 3:10). The chorus is—of course—the same as before. But immediately afterward, the chorus instrumentation provides the accompaniment for an electric guitar solo from Steven (at around 3:36). It’s very much a guitar solo that’d not be out-of-place on Pearl Jam’s Ten (again, obligatory grunge shout-out for Katie), but it’s also one that’s full of quick little runs that are technical compared to what normally comes from Steven’s solos. But what truly makes this solo excellent is that it’s the last truly happy moment on Fear of a Blank Planet. Sort of a last hoorah before “Sleep Together” and it’s one heck of a hoorah.
Once Steven’s guitar solo wraps up and the band crashes out, there’s a new section (at about 4:14) utilizing only acoustic guitar. In fact, there’s multiple layers of acoustic guitar slathered into this rather ambient-sounding bit. The first acoustic pattern plays throughout the sequence, but there’s other patterns which pop in-and-out of the mix. Including one which only picks half the notes of the original pattern. Fortunately, they’re in perfect sync with one another, so it remains musical and following the 6/4 meter. Later in the section, there’s some intermittent piano bits from Richard.
But then, the ambient acoustic section morphs without warning into the heaviest riff in the entire song (at around 4:53). It’s a riff where Colin and Steven chug along on off-beat notes to create a mechanized effect. If that mechanized effect rings true for Gavin, then Gavin serves as an industrial-strength conveyor-belt which propels everything forward. Until things come to a head at a variant of the chorus (at about 5:06). I say variant because in this version, the vocals are so processed that some of the lyrics are indecipherable—and I’ve never seen what’s being said on a lyric sheet.
After the chorus with indecipherable lyrics ends (at around 5:19), Gavin gets a drum solo supported by the heavy riff from earlier (near 4:53). Needless to say, Gavin goes completely ballistic. Thirty-second note walls of kick-pedal? Check. Snares that switch from ghost-snares to fully-accented snares at the drop of a hat? Check. Aggressive smashing of cymbals? Check. Rapid runs of toms? Check. Making beats that mix all of the above on off and on beats? Check.
Following the sheer technical chops of Gavin’s drum solo, the song makes a jarring jump to the last chorus (at around 5:44). It’s still the same awesome chorus as before, but the real fun comes right afterwards. The extended outro groove (starting at about 6:10) of “Way Out of Here” utilizes a lot of elements of prior parts of the song and puts them in a stew which happens to work wonderfully together. For example, the re-emergence of Colin’s bass pattern from the second verse acts as a pulsating counterpoint to the madness that’s brewing with the other instruments. The other element of order comes from Steven’s ambient acoustic figure (from near 4:14). Disorder does arise in part due to Richard’s synths, which play in tones so discordant that I half-expect for him to jump into the famous ‘Psycho strings’ at any moment.
But the most hectic part of the song comes from Gavin Harrison’s drumming. Picture the verse two drum rhythm on ride-cymbal instead of hi-hat. And a tendency to jump between various toms and cymbals in fills which take up half of a measure or more. It’s a chaotic mess and the fact that Gavin can duplicate this live proves that he’s a force to be reckoned with behind the drumkit. It’s not for nothing that Robert Fripp selected him to be one of three drummers for the 2013 reformation of King Crimson.
The band abruptly cuts out (at around 7:27) and the ending consists of a drum-loop, Richard holding out the final note of the synth part, and a sputtering little whirr of a King Crimson-esque soundscape. That last one forms a perfect bridge to the grimy opening of “Sleep Together.”
The sheer amount of sound variety on “Way Out of Here” remains eclipsed only by “Anesthetize” as the album’s most-progressive track. Although the switching of dynamics alone doesn’t make a song, the way they’re employed fits the lyrics like a glove. For instance, there are few moments on a Porcupine Tree album more chilling than the all-too-quiet opening verse. Likewise, there are just as few moments in their discography that are as angry in the rock-and-roll spirit as this song’s chorus.
As one of Porcupine Tree’s more-aggressive songs, “Way Out of Here” also works as a display of the band’s instrumental prowess. Especially in regards to Gavin’s powerhouse drumming—in a performance only bested by “Anesthetize,” “Time Flies,” and “Bonnie The Cat” as far as technicality is concerned. Steven’s varied—with influence of punk, ambient, metal, prog, and classic rock—guitar work offers one of his more technical displays of talent. Colin’s higher-register bass lines end up holding things steady while leaving some room for him to stand out.
The song ends up functioning as another grand-slam in an album that’s pretty close to perfect.
“Sleep Together” (7:28)
While “Sleep Together” remains my personal least-favorite song on Fear of a Blank Planet, the song does have merit serving as the album’s closing track. That’s true both on a musical and a lyrical level. Lyrically, the song doesn’t just indicate the literal death of the Path B speaker through suicide—“Sleep Together” reflects the horrific end-result of disassociation from reality, a total death of the soul. In that sense, the song exhibits a nihilistic sense of self-loathing that ends up projecting that hatred onto everyone and everything around the speaker. In that sense, the song is still about suicide—no doubt about it. But it goes deeper than that when one considers that the disassociation from reality was sparked by the stigmatization of youth in the Blank Planet.
Regarding the music which surrounds this, this song opts for a sound which Porcupine Tree hadn’t attempted before. That sound—industrial metal—owes a debt to Nine Inch Nails and instead of creating a crushingly-heavy song, Steven and company opt for a sound that’s as blackened, soulless, and gone as the song’s speaker. Up until now, one could expect even the heavier songs of Porcupine Tree to have moments of levity thanks to Richard’s army of keyboards. But in “Sleep Together,” the warped and bottom-heavy synths of Richard sound dark enough that even Mikael Akerfeldt said that this was the darkest-sounding music that Steven had written up to this point. Considering that Akerfeldt fronts a band called Opeth and writes music like this (which I happen to like, even if progressive death-metal’s an acquired taste), that’s saying a lot.
Those qualities rear their ugly head in the lyrics as early as Steven’s first verse:
This means out.
This is your way out.
Do or drown.
Do or drown in torpor.
The first line of “This means out” puts this as simply as possible: this is a means of escape from the Blank Planet at any cost. But “This is your way out” (emphasis mine) puts a sinister implication in this song. “Sleep Together” isn’t just about the speaker’s suicide—it’s about the suicide of himself and someone else he’s made a suicide pact with. Given the solipsism of the album’s speaker, there’s been no indication of who this other person is. The closest thing which I can think of would be the woman at the end of “Anesthetize,” but that would mean that Paths B and C are really just Path B. Which makes sense that a song with the mood of “Sentimental” comes after the defeat at the end of “Anesthetize.” But that implies that he saw the woman again between the events of “Sentimental” and “Sleep Together,” to which I’d suggest that it might’ve been on the train and that “Way Out of Here” starts by train tracks because he just got off of a train.
The third line—“Do or drown”—contains two meanings. First, “Do” involves survival while “drown” is a synonym for suicide. The other meaning—one that the speaker’s messed-up enough to believe himself—suggests that “Do” means to go through with committing suicide while “drown” entails conforming to the Blank Planet.
While the first part of “Do or drown in torpor” seems like a restatement of “This means out,” that last word—torpor—warrants a closer look. The definition of torpor is as follows:
Tor-por (n): a state of lowered physiological activity characterized by reduced metabolism, heart rate, respiration, and body temperature that occurs in varying degrees especially in hibernating and estivating animals
This definition has multiple layers or relevance. First, the symptoms of “reduced metabolism, heart rate, respiration, and body temperature” are typically those in a state of either sleep or under anesthesia. Those qualities—metabolism, heart rate, respiration, and body temperature—are also the vital signs and since the song’s already established that suicide’s on the table, those will be lowered below the threshold needed to sustain life. In a sense, the mention of hibernating animals proves apt in light of the title since it suggests how the characters view suicide.
The sense of self-loathing becomes further developed in the next four lines that Steven sings in the same disaffected manner as the previous four lines:
Leave no trace.
All my files erased.
Burn my clothes.
Burn my Prada trainer.
On one hand, these four lines offer all the emotions which the speaker can still express. I’ve never felt suicidal impulses or had suicidal thoughts, but lines like these fall in line with notions of being dead-set on self-destruction. A deeper dive uncovers something worse than that.
Those first two lines—“Leave no trace/All my files erased”—are plain-spoken simple language that invokes technology in the second line. However, what they imply is a condemnation of the society of the Blank Planet far more damning than any other suicide could. To understand this, one should look at the Roman concept of damnatio memorae (Latin for “condemnation of memory”). In the times of Ancient Rome, this was a special form of dishonor that—if passed by the Roman Senate—fell upon traitors post-mortem. This dishonor—amounting to erasing people from history for their crimes—was viewed by the Romans as a fate worse than death. In practice, this boiled down to destroying any evidence of the existence of particularly heinous emperors (Caligula, Nero, and Commodus being three examples). This included the seizure/razing of property, the erasure of his name from the public record, and the reworking of any depiction in art. While complete erasure wasn’t always possible since that’d mean no archaeological evidence of anyone under damnatio memorae would exist, the destruction of memory cast a swath throughout the Roman Empire. For an example of how thorough that destruction ran in Ancient Rome, look no further than the family of Septimius Severus.
This family portrait of the Severan family consists of Septimius Severus (top right), his wife Julia Domna (top left), and their sons Caracalla and Geta. Septimus was the emperor at the time this portrait was made, but after he died, Caracalla and Geta tried to rule the Roman Empire as joint emperors. This failed so badly that Caracalla—after declaring him a traitor—ordered Geta to be murdered by centurions in the arms of their mother. After Geta’s death, either Caracalla or the Roman senate (sources are conflicted) ordered damnatio memorae and Caracalla was bound by Roman law. The cropping out of Geta’s face on portraiture in that family portrait illustrates just how thorough the practice of damnatio memorae was to the general public of the Roman Empire. The only reason we know about the reign of any Roman emperor who had damnatio memorae inflicted upon them is that the Emperor’s line of succession kept a record of all of that.
In both the example from Ancient Rome and in the speaker’s actions, there was an erasure of existence. That the speaker inflicts this on himself speaks volumes as to how low he feels about himself and suggests that a life in the Blank Planet is so meaningless that it’s better if no one can ever know he was ever a thought, let alone alive. That these two lines involve technology isn’t insignificant. That’s because the rapid rate of technological leaps since 2007 (and especially in the future) have made a case of auto-damnatio memorae difficult if not impossible to achieve.
But to someone who’s even more hell-bent on getting out of the world than erasing all existence, that may not matter. That makes the last two lines— “Burn my clothes/Burn my prada trainer”—intriguing. In some sense, there’s probably a slow-acting poison in effect as a suicide method. I say that because the nudity implied by these lines suggests that the speaker and whoever he’s made a suicide pact with are having sex either before or while the poison’s taking effect. There’s a rich case of symbolic weight to this nudity, though. Partly since a nude death means that the speaker’s leaving the world in the same state that he entered. Partly because it’s a final repudiation of the material possessions espoused by the society of the Blank Planet. Partly because the barren nothingness entailed by the nudity suggests that the state of being dead will be no different than existing in the Blank Planet.
Almost immediately after Steven finishes says “Burn my Prada trainer,” Steven roars into this chorus in a voice which sounds eerily like Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails:
Let’s sleep together right now.
Relieve the pressure somehow.
Switch off the future right now.
Let’s leave forever
Everything which I’ve uncovered about this song so far—self-loathing, escapism, and hopelessness—comes to the fore-front with this chorus. If one has even passing familiarity with William Shakespeare, they probably know that “sleep” was famously used in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy as a synonym for death (appropriate given Hamlet’s contemplating suicide in that soliloquy). And that’s the same definition of “sleep” being used in “Sleep Together.” Sure, these two people may be drifting off to sleep before death, but poison guarantees that it’ll be a big sleep.
The first line alone—“Let’s sleep together right now”—communicates an immediate sense of urgency. For starters, one should note that the speaker’s telling every word of this chorus right to the other person. Further linguistic details include the command form of “Let’s” suggesting that there’s an imbalance of power in the relations between these two. And considering what these two people are about to go through with, there’s enough mental health problems between them that such a skewed set of relations is guaranteed. Another language detail comes from “together” being the only time the album’s speaker ever emphasizes a bond with another human being besides himself. In one respect, his identity converges with another person’s just before both are extinguished. But in another respect, it’s a sign that the speaker grew a little bit at the very end. Finally, “right now” insists that the speaker’s absolutely had it regarding the Blank Planet and that it’s so beyond hope of saving that it’s better to give up and kill himself than continue to rot away in a numbing state which he despises.
That hopelessness bleeds into the following line—“Relieve the pressure somehow”—via what’s unstated somehow stating more than what is stated. This hinges upon the lack of specificity in “somehow.” While the method being proposed to “Relieve the pressure” is obvious in-context, this lack of specificity tugs at multiple trains of thought. One idea raised by an earlier line (“Do or drown in torpor”) connotes that the suicide method is a fatal overdose of pills.
The third line—“Switch off the future right now”—points to specific language being used to make the situation seem less dire than in actuality. Using “Switch off” instead of “destroy” gives an impression of a mechanism instead of an act of violence. That deceit also falls apart once one looks into the speaker’s lies since a mechanical process remains reversible while a violent act is irreversible. But on another level, the speaker’s apt in making the process of suicide into a mechanism. Given that the method’s the ingestion of a fatal amount of pills, there’s the mechanisms of the body at play in this self-destructive act. Mechanisms such as muscles of the hands to carry the pills, the swallowing muscles, and the digestive system. As for “the future,” that’s the plan for them set in place by the Blank Planet which they repudiate in an act of suicide. Or more accurately, they believe that suicide’s the only way to escape the control of the Blank Planet.
The last set of original lines in the song which Steven sings definitely warrant dissecting:
This is fate.
This is your escape.
Leave here now.
Leave here like it’s over.
The first line of this verse—“This is fate”—brings up a point that has hung a shadow over large chunks of Fear of a Blank Planet. That point comes from the fact that the Blank Planet system has stripped away most aspects of choice from the lives of young people. Instead, their choices are made by authority figures in ways that benefit those in charge. And then the results of the choice end up getting tossed to the kids/teens. So it’s easy for someone in this mindset to believe that there’s no choice in anything. Especially when the speaker uses the word “fate,” a word with ancient (dating back as far as Old Norse Sagas) connotations relating to events being pre-determined by a higher power. That word’s usage has an unsettling implication regarding how one-sided the balance of power is in this situation: teenagers are mere mortals, but the Blank Planet has the power of a god.
However, the second line—“This is your escape”—contradicts the previous line by adding an element of choice. That contradiction might serve as something deliberate on the part of the speaker. After all, it’s been established in an earlier verse that the “your” pertains to another person. Which implies that the speaker is—in this line—actively deceiving another person into killing themselves with him. However, that element of choice may also serve as a reflection of the speaker’s jaded worldview: that the old Shakespearean question of “To be or not to be” is the only choice left for a teen to make in the Blank Planet.
This concept gets reiterated in the “Leave here now/Leave here like it’s over” construction, but there are subtle developments, reinforcements, and holes in the speaker’s words. A reinforcement comes from “now” indicating the present-tense and therefore emphasizing the element of choice. This attitude gets fleshed-out by “over,” a word which holds connotations of defeat—as if the speaker’s unconsciously aware that via the fact that the Blank Planet broke him enough to go through with this, the Blank Planet already won. That very concept of the Blank Planet winning in the end undercuts even the slightest notion of the speaker’s suicidal escape being glorified. Instead, to use “like it’s over” instead of “cause it’s over” paints the speaker’s suicide as an escapist fantasy crossed with a power fantasy—not based in reality. The crux of that “like it’s over” construction involves pretending like things are past-tense because of the decisions already made by the Blank Planet—there’s no point in living when one has no autonomy, so the speaker believes that the freedom to kill himself is the only choice that’s left. But that belief comes from a self-deception brought on by apathy.
As a piece of music, “Sleep Together” gets off to a promising start (at about 0:05) thanks to a nightmarish synth line from Richard Barbieri played in 4/4 at a tempo of 145 BPM. If I were to describe this distorted pulse of a synth line in a single word, that word would be ‘formless.’ Perhaps that’s an apt word since the speaker’s travelling to an unknown land of death that the entire oeuvre of Steven’s lyrics (up to now) have only referred to in the connotations of the “Never look for the truth in your mother’s eyes” line from “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here.” However, an even better word to describe what Richard plays would be ‘chaotic.’ And that’s a word which I mean in the Miltonic sense, where Chaos refers to the unknowable and unformed mass of the universe apart from Heaven, Hell, and Earth (Paradise Lost had a unique construction of the universe).
Anyways, some form of order arrives at around 0:20, where a piano plays along to the tone of Steven’s voice as he sings the first verse. All the while, Richard continues to pound out the chaotic synth layer with complete abandon. After Steven’s done singing the first verse (at about 0:45), Richard (via overdubs) has an airy layer of synth added into the sound that’ll run through the entire second verse. But before that, Gavin enters with his drums (at around 0:59) and here is the moment where the dehumanizing element comes full-force. Mostly due to the rhythm of Gavin’s drumming evoking industrial grooves so effectively that it’s mechanical. In most drumming circles, that’s an insult to a drummer since it insists that they’re so focused on technicality that they forsake things such as feel and groove. However, in the case of “Sleep Together” (a song where dehumanization and self-destruction are at the core of both the lyrics and the music), it’s the ideal sound.
Apart from the drum rhythm being added, the second verse (starting at about 1:12) is nearly-identical to the first. Meanwhile, the song’s first chorus (at around 1:44) mark the point where Steven’s guitar and Colin’s bass enter the song. All that Steven plays for these choruses are three simple power chords in an ascending pattern—metallic, but easy to play. Colin’s more energetic and willing to pack in more notes edge-wise, but he follows the same general scale that Steven does. Both of these qualities—combined the terse drumming from Gavin—create a plodding, industrial rhythm which sounds like the backbone of a lost Nine Inch Nails track. Sweetening the deal is the post-chorus (at about 2:06), which adds violin swells into the mix that push this song into a nightmarish grandeur.
Once the violin swells stop, there’s a return to the chaotic opening synth pattern from the intro (at around 2:35) in a section that’s a transition from the chorus to the next verse. During this, we’re introduced to a new two-measure bassline from Colin that grooves along the verse pattern. More striking comes Gavin’s trippy fills that modulate the rhythm into something one would find in a breakbeat—an unorthodox touch to implement in a regular beat, but it’s a distinctive Gavin touch.
Apart from the new bassline in the verse (starting at about 2:49) and the violin swells throughout the chorus (at around 3:21), the second verse-chorus-postchorus unit isn’t too different from that of the first. Meaning that things truly get interesting starting at the break (appearing at around 4:12). Here, there's a return to the intro synth pattern. Only now, it seems like times has slowed down. Given that this section probably represents the speaker and/or the other person taking a fatal amount of pills, time may very well be slowing down. Think of this much like "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce.
Suddenly, a layer of piano enters the song (at about 4:25). And going off of live footage from the Anesthetize DVD, Steven’s playing this part since he’s not playing guitar here. In either case, it’s a hypnotic-sounding part which has various layers of overdubs threatening to throw off the core melody, but it always manages to complement it. In a way, it achieves a similar effect as the acoustic ambient part of “Way Out of Here,” but this keyboard part utilizes a more out-there scale. And that alien quality indicates what this section represents in the song—the speaker’s body beginning to come under the strain of the fatal dose, but it hasn’t fully kicked-in yet.
After a lengthy bit, Steven re-enters the song on guitar (at around 5:26) just before a drum fill from Gavin kicks the song into gear via a beat not dissimilar to that of the verses. Meanwhile, Richard plays an airy mellotron-esque layer of synths until a momentary break happens. Once the break ends (at about 5:52), all the same layers of instrumentation occur. Only now, Colin re-enters the song with an earlier bassline (the one originally appearing near 2:35). Also, there’s an additional layer of synth from Richard that sound like something that’s water-logged—the speaker’s body has reached the critical point and there’s nothing he could do to stop him from dying. Not even if he wanted to live.
Following a drum fill, the song morphs into the rhythm of the chorus (at around 6:25), complete with echoes of Steven yelling “Let’s sleep forever” fading in-and-out of the mix. This familiar rhythm serves as the accompaniment for an unexpected turn from Richard—a violin solo achieved via a setting on his synthesizer. It’s a violin solo which has moments of harmony and moments of dissonance. Given the context of the song, it’s not too unreasonable to assume that the latter element is symbolic of the kiss of death and of passing out due to the fatal dose finally kicking in. Likewise, the crashing-out of every instrument after the end of the solo marks the instant of the speaker’s demise—indicating that the suicide was successful.
Despite “Sleep Together” constituting a closer that’s as grimy and nasty as the lyrical content, the song’s a definite step down from the rest of the album. There’s something that feels slightly missing from this song that’s present in the other five songs. I think the build-up towards the end might overstay its welcome before breaking into the violin solo. That’s not necessarily a knock on “Sleep Together,” but an acknowledgment that the prior five tracks are stronger and feel absent of unnecessary elongations of sections.
What makes “Sleep Together” another sign of Steven’s genius comes via his willingness to immerse himself into whatever musical styling he’s determined to tackle. The industrial flavoring of “Sleep Together”—for better or worse—is played as tightly as a seasoned veteran of the genre. Even without a technical display of instrumentation, “Sleep Together” stands out thanks to a lock-step synchronicity between all the band members. Especially in regards to Richard, who plays a set of inhuman-sounding synths darken the sonic brew further than the gun-metal-grey instrumentation ever could.
If “Sleep Together” represents the weakest link of Fear of a Blank Planet, that speaks volumes towards the quality of an album that—as it grows through the years—can potentially unseat In Absentia as their masterwork. For many, it already has.
Final Thoughts:
There are some which argue that Fear of a Blank Planet is the greatest album that Porcupine Tree ever released. To me, it’s a potential tie with In Absentia, but the level of growth the band exhibits in the five years between those two releases cannot be ignored. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the sonic variety and the technical virtuosity. In the case of the former, there’s no confusing any two songs on the album with one another—from the rapid-fire metal of the title track, the soaring balladry of “My Ashes,” the suite-like structure of “Anesthetize,” the sheer moodiness of “Sentimental,” every display of dynamics in “Way Out of Here,” and the industrial stomp of “Sleep Together,” each song has a distinct character and tone. Regarding the latter, there’s no way that the level of skill which all the members—Gavin especially—display on Fear of a Blank Planet didn’t stem from years of experience and working together as a collective.
The album’s concept definitely plays a role as to why Fear of a Blank Planet tops In Absentia for many listeners. Even if the concept that runs through each album deals with realistic and disturbing subject matter, the topics on Fear of a Blank Planet can hit listeners harder. Not everyone has encountered a serial killer or known someone who became the victim of a serial killer. Things such as mental illness, isolation, depression, the dangers of technology, prescription drug abuse, and suicide have become practically ubiquitous in the years following the 2007 release of Fear of a Blank Planet. If one hasn’t known those things from experience, then you’ll have known someone who has or can read about it on the news on a regular basis. Out of Steven’s concept albums, Fear of a Blank Planet remains (along with Hand. Cannot. Erase.) the most universal to listeners. That it addresses subject matter that’s become more pertinent in 2018 than ever proves that Fear of a Blank Planet is the rare album that grows better with age.
Unfortunately, Fear of a Blank Planet ended up serving as Porcupine Tree’s final stone-cold classic. The next—and final—album from them (The Incident) hardly ever shows up in discussions for the band’s best albums. While I don’t consider that album to be a stinker, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a mild disappointment and the most mixed-bag album in the band’s discography. Since it’s my next review, it’s going to be interesting for me to try to approach this as honestly as possible. Especially since I have far less experience with The Incident than any other album of theirs post-On The Sunday of Life.
Next Reviews:
* Porcupine Tree - "The Incident" (September 14, 2009)
* Steven Wilson - "Insurgentes" (November 26, 2008)
* Steven Wilson - "Grace For Drowning" [Double Album] (September 26, 2011)
* Steven Wilson - "The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)" (February 25, 2013)
* Steven Wilson - "Hand. Cannot. Erase." (February 27, 2015)
* Steven Wilson - "To The Bone" (August 18, 2017)