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Steven Wilson Retrospective Part 20: Porcupine Tree - "The Incident" (September 14, 2009)


So unless Steven were to one day reform Porcupine Tree (unlikely given his stance on moving forward), this is the band’s swan song. The thing about writing this review that will make this challenging is Disc One, a suite-like composition that Steven designed from the outset to all link to an “incident.” Vague concept, but we’ll go with that…with the one in the title track being a car wreck. Disc Two consists of four unrelated songs spawned from the same writing sessions. But the nearly hour-long song cycle that takes up Disc One is the main attraction. While not a rock opera on the level of something like Tommy or The Wall, the epic suite does function similarly—which has positives and drawbacks.

To be frank about this album, it’s a mild disappointment compared to the five which came before it. There are still great moments scattered throughout The Incident, but the album’s nowhere near as consistent as Stupid Dream, Lightbulb Sun, In Absentia, Deadwing, or Fear of a Blank Planet. The big conceptual piece has one giant flaw to it: the structure’s need for transitions often comes at the expense of fully-formed songs. Apart from “Time Flies,” “Occam’s Razor/The Blind House,” "Octane Twisted/The Seance/Circle of Manias," and “Bonnie The Cat,” there’s nothing here which—musically or lyrically—I’d consider on the level of the band’s prior material.

The band also stated that the lyrics were something which were less emphasized this time about. That honestly shows since this album comes across as a mixed bag lyrically. There are songs with some of Steven’s best lyrics (“Time Flies,” “The Blind House”), some of his worst (“Drawing The Line”), some of his most indefensible (“Bonnie The Cat,” “Remember Me Lover”), some of his shortest (most of the transitions, but especially “Kneel and Disconnect,” which has only two lines of lyrics), and some of his most unorthodox (“Flicker,” whose lyrics were written by Steven ‘attempting’ a self-delusional practice known as automatic writing).

All that being said, The Incident is not a bad album. I’d sooner listen to this than On The Sunday of Life, but this is just about the last album I’d recommend as someone’s first Porcupine Tree album. For every not-so-good song on the album, there’s a good song to counter it. It’s just unfortunate that an album as average as this one ended up being the band’s swan-song.

Admittedly, this was an album which I hadn’t listened to until I did so on a whim in the earlier stages of the retrospective. While I’d been familiar with “Time Flies” for a while, The Incident as a whole is an album I have much less familiarity to than with any of the eight albums that came before it. Therefore, I can’t guarantee an analysis as in-depth as that of prior albums. Especially when it comes to how the sound of the instrumentation informs the interpretation of the lyrics.

The way I organized grouped the tracks that make up the title suite together for this review relates to how they flow together on the album version. Several of the shorter tracks flow continuously as if they were a single long track, but there are definite breaks. Instead of 14 tracks of the movement, there are 14 sections across 5 songs for me to deal with. However, each of the sub-sections will be broken-off into their own review segment. As for disc two songs, they’ll get a normal review.

  • Disc One: “The Incident” (55:15)

  • “Occam’s Razor”/“The Blind House” (7:42)

  • “Occam’s Razor”

The term "Occam's Razor" refers to a concept in philosophy through which complex issues are boiled down to absolute basics in order to make them easier to understand and work with. Porcupine Tree's album The Incident in general is about the phenomenon that mass media tend to label tragedies that happen to people (such as car crashes, suicides, etc.) as mere “incidents” — something turns a complex moment in somebody's life into a much simpler concept. Steven’s loose theme suggests that the media’s active simplification of events as sensationalism results in dehumanization. That simplification is also an act of Occam’s razor where something gets lost in the process.

Fittingly, this song is very simple. In fact, it’s more of a rhythmic pulsing introduction of diminished guitar chords that leads into “The Blind House.”

  • “The Blind House”

One of the strongest songs on The Incident, “The Blind House” deftly balances the heavy and melodic sides of Porcupine Tree’s sound. Crushing riffs from Steven and Colin, pulse-pounding drumming from Gavin, and eerie keyboard work from Richard are all in full-effect on this track. But Steven’s lyrics utilize a crowning example of the type of traumatic situation which the media oversimplifies by providing just the facts and none of the emotional strain which facilitated those facts. That example comes from the April 2008 raid of the YFZ ranch, where a Mormon community in Texas (hello, home-state of Katie) actively groomed underage women to become brides. Furthermore, there’s ample evidence that the higher-ups of the community sexually assaulted these women. The lyrics act like a Robert Browning-esque dramatic monologue from the perspective of the perpetrators. However, like some of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues (particularly those involving unsavory characters), the speaker ends up revealing too much. That’ especially true when looking between the lines.

The first bit of lyrics which Steven sings on the album should provide a good look at how the lyrics operate on The Incident:

If you wanna stay always here.

All these years, the last frontier.

It’s no concern of theirs, the world outside

Corrupts my child, so trust these eyes.

It’s clear from the first line—“If you wanna stay always here”—that this song starts in the middle of the ordeal. A clear hit comes from the “you” being one of the women in the ranch and the person whom the speaker (likely one of the abusers) is talking to. Even as early as this first line, the use of “wanna” corrals in an element of deception in the lyrics. Since this functions as an appeal to the woman’s wants, the abuser’s trying to make the woman seem like she has some power. This comes across as particularly insidious since the situation of sexual assault of the real-life YFZ ranch involved consent being non-existent. The time quantifier of “always” outlines the intentions of the speaker—control at any cost.

In regards to the next line of “All these years, the last frontier,” the time descriptor of “All these years” indicates the length of how long this ranch’s abuses have lasted. But it’s “the last frontier” which registers as the more-striking phrase of lyrics in this line. That wording of “the last frontier” operates on two levels. One, it suggests that it’s the last place that the abusive priests can get away with this abuse. Two, it’s a “frontier” from an apparently sinful society because of being secluded from society. These two are linked since the seclusion from society enables the abuse to remain undetected.

Two lines which comprise the second half of this quatrain—“It’s no concern of theirs, the world outside/Corrupts my child, so trust these eyes”—illustrate a lot about the religious ethos of the speaker and how he uses it to dominate over these women. Starting with “no concern of theirs,” there’s an implied critique by Steven regarding how religion can be utilized to hurt others. That critique—one against the idea of keeping women in the dark for reasons of ‘religious purity’—outright suggests that the idea’s a ruse constructed to maintain power. This serves to make “the world outside/Corrupts my child” all-the-more hypocritical. Since if the speaker associates the outside world as sinful, it’s a bit of dark irony that—by raping these kidnapped women—he’s involved in something any sensible person would consider a heinous act. The disparity between the moralistic implications of religion and the cut-throat tactics of the religious are in full effect with the phrase “so trust these eyes.” That phrase evokes the idiom of ‘eyes as windows of soul,’ but utilizes that concept as a weapon to control these women. A loaded concept that—with connections towards the Christian meaning of the soul—indicates how thoroughly this particular sect has perverted the basic tenants of the faith in order to fulfill their selfish ends.

The next five lines of lyrics from Steven come about and escalate the stakes of the situation:

Faith is in your souls, but in these walls,

Hormones stall, dogs will crawl.

The vices and the doubt

We resist all this shit.

So kneel, submit.

Just how this verse starts—“Faith is in your souls, but in these walls”—ends up undercutting the speaker’s own argument. Unknowingly or not, to state that “Faith is in your souls” acknowledges that—by the words actually stated by Jesus in the Bible—the victims are the ones in the right, not the abusers. That shows that despite Steven’s atheism, he can still see something admirable about those who utilize faith like the victims in this situation: not to overpower others, not to think that suffering will lead you to a better afterlife, but as perseverance and active resistance against tyranny. But at the same time, one has to look at the connotations behind the phrase “but in these walls.” Very much a phrase illustrating a division between the biblical teachings of Jesus and how various people practice them. In the case of the abusive religious leaders in this song, they use it as a front to rape women and force them into marriage. Yes, I said ‘women’ as in plural because the YFZ ranch was a Mormon establishment practicing polygamy. But I think that the admiration for how the victims utilize faith is given a polar opposite in how the abusers utilize it. Namely, the scale and the power that the abusers have with their faith is something that I think Steven’s in awe of even with full awareness of the barbarity of their actions. And I think that not because of these lyrics, but because Steven’s said as much:

“It’s not religion that concerns me, it’s not people who have spiritual beliefs, but it’s the politics of religion and the commercial side of religion. Which, in some ways, is the sickest and most disturbing form of politics we have on this Earth, because it masquerades as something else. It masquerades as something, a gateway for people to happiness and to an afterlife or whatever, when in fact all it is, is just people exploiting other people weaker than themselves for the purposes of power and money.”

That quote from Steven stemmed from an interview from the Lightbulb Sun era regarding the track “Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled,” whose second half was an instrumental loaded with a sample of a tape recording by the leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult before that cult’s mass suicide. That quote is also important to consider in “The Blind House” because the mass sexual assault committed by the YFZ ranch boils down to another method of exploitation.

The following line—“Hormones stall, dogs will crawl”—outlines the seediness of this form of exploitation. In fact, “Hormones stall”—while a phrase with several possible meanings—outright reveals the pedophiliac intentions of the speaker. Especially given that most hormones develop during puberty. Meaning that the stalling of hormones aims to artificially preserve the pre-pubescent state because the abusers find the state of adolescence frustrating. A group of rapists such as these likely see the conditions of menstruation and pregnancy as something which creates limitations regarding how often they can rape these girls. If that weren’t horrible enough, the phrase that follows—“dogs will crawl”—both suggests squalid conditions for the girls and that the abusers treat them like literal bitches. There’s no such thing as mutual respect here—only the exercising of power in the basest form.

Further connotations arise from the lines “The vices and the doubt/We resist all this shit,” where the speaker makes himself out as an even bigger hypocrite than the listener initially thought. Obviously, “vices” refer to things which the religion considers sinful. But “doubt” entails that the act of questioning one’s own faith is comparable to a sin, which effectively posits blind faith and biblical literalism as ideal. Steven (on blind faith) has been quoted as saying that faith “in that sense becomes a synonym for believing a lie,” something which probably holds merit here. But in this case, the “lie” comes from believing in a perversion of religion so strongly that by stating that you “resist all this shit,” you’re cockily claiming that you’re above sin. That strikes as particularly galling considering what the speaker’s doing. And that hypocrisy is made all-the-more blatant by the capping line of “So kneel, submit,” a command with disturbing connotations in regards to the YFZ ranch.

What “The Blind House” has for a chorus is, admittedly, a good one:

Free love, free love,

Free love in all my sisters.

Breathe out, blind house.

You don’t need to know their secrets.

Believe me.

The chant of “Free love, free love” comes across as insidious in that it’s what the Mormons of the YFZ ranch claim as an ideal. Alternatively, it’s a means for the abusers to disable any sense of guilt regarding the rapes they’re committing. Because “love” sounds like a more appealing way to describe the events here than “rape,” right? No, it’s not. But the crux of the argument is that the members of the cult might be so fucked-up that they’ve convinced themselves that “love” and “rape” mean the same exact thing. As already established, the place they live is cut-off from society, so a degree of delusionality like that could possibly have happened. Either way, it’s a case of the cult members drinking the Kool-Aid. Just that in this case, it killed their conscience instead of their mortal bodies.

The line that follows—“Free love in all my sisters”—quantifies things further, but also makes things more subject to interpretation. That phrase can mean that the speaker encourages the sister-wives to be friendly and not jealous of one another. But given that the speaker and the rest of the cult are so fucked-up that they believe “love” is synonymous with “rape,” there’s nothing stopping one from suggesting that “in” means that the speaker’s thinking this while in the act of raping these girls. If that’s true, it’s the most explicit depiction of rape in any of Steven Wilson’s lyrics (save perhaps “Gravity Eyelids”), but this might also serve as the most-insidious one. A keyword for that insidious quality is “sisters,” which conveys that the speaker’s trying to impose a familial structure onto this—symbolically normalizing the abominably fucked-up actions he does on a regular basis.

The first part of the two-part phrase “Breathe out, blind house” links to the notion that the speaker’s thinking the lines of the chorus as he’s raping a woman. But those two words—“Breathe out”—are a command which he verbalizes to her as if to say “This isn’t something to panic about. Hold still, it’ll all be over soon.” If that’s not horribly fucked-up due to the faux-docility of the speaker, it’s due to the attempt to normalize the experience of rape in the minds of these women.

Such a bleak notion appears contrasted with the image of “blind house,” but that image operates on multiple levels and each of them makes what happens with “Breathe out” all-the-more haunting. In one sense, the phrase “blind house” entails that the world’s blind to the actions which unfold in the house. In another, that phrase implies that the people in the house are blind to the world outside. On a third level, the rest of the Mormon order have turned a blind eye towards what goes on in that house. All those meanings convey the fact that ignorance, denial, suppression, and abuse of power enable the perpetuation of atrocities like this one.

That exact idea of abuse of power and suppression comes in full-force with the line “You don’t need to know their secrets.” For instance, the identity of “their” is most likely the higher-ups that the speaker answers to. Some claim that this secrecy relates to the fact that YFZ ranch was a Mormon establishment, but I think it’s something else. That something else the encouragement of blind obedience in order to perpetuate the abuse of power. And it’s in the speaker’s best interest to do so because it allows this state to continue. That he follows it up with “Believe me”—a command to not pry into the root of the problem and see how corrupt the order is—cinches it.

Following the chorus, there’s another verse which has Steven deliver these lyrics:

Pray and violate, abuse your trust.

False gods must purge their lust.

A family that lies to seal your fate,

To take the weight of their self-hate.

A dichotomy highlighted in the first part of “Pray and violate, abuse your trust” remains one which has been present in the whole song, but not painted in such explicit terms until now. And that dichotomy’s the one between religion and sex. Considering that pre-marital sex is frowned upon in certain sects of Christianity, these abusive Mormon’s at YFZ probably saw the forced marriage as a loophole. Ironically, it’s one inhumanity being traded for another. However, one must consider that because the speaker’s the one saying “Pray and violate,” the phrase has two applications. One, it’s directed at himself telling himself to pray and to violate these women—unlikely given that “Free love” suggested that they switched terms to suppress their own guilt. The other (and more likely) idea entails that the phrase admonishes the girl for violating the boundaries of the marriage contract by not blindly following the commands of the speaker. In that sense, it’s an abuse of trust, but also an assertion of independence and a sign that the speaker’s dominance isn’t absolute.

Such a lack of absolution plays into the phrase “False gods must purge their lust.” Namely that “False gods” acknowledges that the speaker’s aware of the façade inherent to being powerful: even if those in power act like gods, they’re still mortal men. As for the following phrase-part of “must purge their lust,” that’s the speaker trying to justify the sexual abuse of the Mormons in the YFZ ranch. The problem with that comes from the fact that the listener can see right through such a bald-faced lie.

Lies end up becoming tied to an earlier element in the next line: “A family that lies to seal your fate.” That earlier element comes from the imposing of a familial structure onto the rape-cult depicted in the song—a normalization which “family” symbolically creates. But “lies to seal your fate” expands upon the hopelessness of the girl’s situation. In this regard, there’s a cockiness that assumes that the speaker won’t get caught—an irony since this song’s made possible by the raid of the ranch.

New elements come into play via the next line: “To take the weight of their self-hate.” This line—since it’s addressed to the girl—works in conjunction with the “your” from the previous line. Meaning that this line’s a command to “take the weight of their [the abusers] self-hate.” From this, there’s an element of the song that’s rather problematic. That element’s via the implication that the abusers are committing their acts of rape because of insecurities with themselves. In this line, that comes across as the speaker and his priestly buddies asserting their dominance over the girls. But it becomes a different matter in the refrain of the last half of the chorus:

Breathe out, blind house.

Free love, feel loved.

That very last phrase—“feel loved”—is a phrase that recurs at various points of the album. Most poignantly at the end of the title track where those words are put into the mouth of a spirit. In the context of “The Blind House,” the phrase makes “take the weight of their self-hate” deeply problematic. Because it entails a few things. First, a reinforcement of the notion that the speaker’s convinced himself that ‘rape’ is a synonym for ‘love.’ Second, it shows that the rape culture of the YFZ ranch stems from an inability in the speaker—the inability to love healthily that existed before the Mormon cult, but escalated into something horrific. Thirdly, it introduces a motif for the song-cycle of people inflicting ‘incidents’ upon others (or having an ‘incident’ inflicted upon them) in an effort to “feel loved.” In the instance of this speaker, it’s a bastardization of what love is, but it’s what he thinks love is and that’s what motivates him. Other points where this motif occurs in the song-cycle don’t have it so bastardized as it is here, but it’s also ambiguous what form of love is meant at other points. In that respect, ‘love’ is to The Incident what ‘significance’ was to Signify.

Musically, some significant details of “The Blind House” include the pummeling riff which kicks it off (one of the heaviest in the band’s catalog), the lushly-delivered verses and choruses, the haunting outro (largely indebted to Richard), and Gavin’s drumming. The chorus remains prettily delivered by Steven despite containing heavy-metal riffage. Despite all of the bombast of the riffs, the last two minutes of this track are rather low-key and are the better for it since it’s not what the listener expects. Just like the women in the real-life case weren’t expecting the raid to happen.

Overall, the combination of “Occam’s Razor/The Blind House” gets The Incident starting on a rousing note. It’s a shame that this level of quality wasn’t maintained throughout the whole suite. If it were, The Incident would be up to snuff with the band’s previous works.

  • ·“Great Expectations”/“Kneel and Disconnect”/“Drawing The Line”/“The Incident”/“Your Unpleasant Family”/“The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train” (17:18)

All of these songs are linked together because they all fade into the next one. Even so, this is the longest cluster. It also ends up serving as where problems begin to crop up in The Incident. While the title track and “Drawing The Line” are full-length songs that can stand-alone decently, the other songs are transitions.

  • “Great Expectations” (1:26)

“Great Expectations” is the first of many ‘transitional’ tracks on the first disc of The Incident that ultimately break up the flow of the album. But there are some striking connections—both musically and lyrically—to “The Blind House.” Musically, the guitar figure (at 0:24).

The first of three sets of lyrics from Steven appears as follows:

A summer day

In garlands I feel secure

A useless faith

That will get you, somehow.

Reach out, I wonder where you are now.

While “A summer day” remains a line which functions as scenic detail, the line “In garlands I feel secure” isn’t expository. For instance, “garlands” situates the listener in a different and more nature-based setting than the claustrophobia in “The Blind House.” But the bone of contention comes from “feel.” There’s a difference between feeling “secure” and actually being secure—a difference which comes into much greater prominence in the last set of lines.

The next two lines—“A useless faith/That will get you, somehow”—draws an indirect link to “The Blind House” via a criticism of organized religion. To describe a religion as “A useless faith” outright points out to the distinction between real-world affairs and the silence of deities. And although the speaker of this song isn’t Steven, the songwriter’s strident atheism comes through in the voice. In fact, it goes farther than what Steven would suggest because to say that the faith will “get” (as in bite one in the backside) someone entails a disdain of people who are religious—something that contradicts Steven saying he has no problem with religious people (provided they don’t abuse their power). But “somehow” throws a wrench into the proceedings by leaving the possibilities of unknowns open—there’s some doubt in the speaker’s voice.

The doubt—as illustrated by “Reach out, I wonder where you are now”—isn’t just for religious concerns. It’s also for real-life concerns. The “you” isn’t named in the song, but the positioning after “The Blind House” in the track listing gives a few clues. First, the speaker of this song definitely knew someone who fell into religion via the YFZ ranch—meaning that this person was manipulated into the vile actions that occurred there. Second, the speaker isn’t religious and didn’t fall in the cult with her friend. Thirdly, “Reach out” implies that she’d help her friend if she knew how (or knew of the problem to begin with).

There’s more than likely a shift in chronology with Steven’s second set of lines:

Hey, there’s you

With placid eyes.

Oblivious to what’s to come.

That shift— starting with “Hey, there’s you/With placid eyes”—probably comes from the speaker remembering the last time she saw her friend. But there’s the fact that—“Oblivious to what’s to come”—implies that the speaker’s standing at a point in time where the raid on the YFZ ranch has already happened. Because the scale and barbarity of the rapes that occurred there weren’t widely-known until that raid exposed it to the world..

This new temporal perspective remains intact for the haunting last lines from Steven:

They locked you up,

So I forgot you.

Forgot your name, so strange.

I wonder if you got out.

Even if the “locked you up” in the lines “They locked you up,/So I forgot you” comes across as figurative, that point of comparison reflects the lack of freedom in the kidnapped women in the YFZ ranch. In this case, “They” are the Mormon priests who kidnapped and raped these women, but applying this particular pronoun instead of referring to what they did depersonalizes the incident. As for “I forgot you,” that shows so many different things: the transitory nature of human friendships, that the speaker didn’t value the friendship as much as she thought, and that a significant amount of time has passed since her friend turned to religion. Interestingly, the motif of someone forgetting a close person in her life was re-explored in Hand. Cannot. Erase., but that motif does have a twist on that album.

That motif’s re-usage in Hand. Cannot. Erase. involves the first part of the phrase “Forgot your name, so strange,” but it’s the second part—“so strange” that warrants elaboration. In this context, “so strange” acknowledges that the human limitations of memory are chaotic and don’t cohere to any schema. For all that people associate memory with human reason, it’s really founded upon chance, emotions, circumstance, and incidents.

And then the final line of the song—“I wonder if you got out”—deepens the link to “The Blind House” via leaving the fate of the speaker’s friend a mystery. Since the speaker remains our only window into her friend and because of the reasonable assumption that the speaker and her friend never re-established contact, her friend may not have survived. As to how she could’ve died, I have four possibilities: beaten to death for resisting her captors, dying during childbirth (impregnation from the rapes in the YFZ ranch did happen), malnutrition due to the squalid conditions, or suicide due to feeling like there’s no other way to escape the ranch. Due to the fact that the speaker doesn’t know the answers, we don’t either.

  • “Kneel and Disconnect” (2:02)

Although it’s another transition track, “Kneel and Disconnect” has more going on musically than “Great Expectations.” Using only two lines of lyrics, “Kneel and Disconnect” melds the lush opening piano of Richard to a constant folksy guitar. All of that lays claim to the soft vocals of Steven that later become harmonized in an ethereal-sounding choral effect. Even though Colin’s bass doesn’t come until fairly late in the song, it’s sliding up-and-down with scales just before Richard unleashes an unsettling outro soundscape.

All things considered, the lyrics of “Kneel and Disconnect” are these two lines repeated over-and-over:

Kneel and disconnect and waste another year.

Fill the application, start a new career.

The first half of the lyrics—“Kneel and disconnect and waste another year”—posits ideas which the second half will counter. Starting with “Kneel and disconnect,” there’s an idea of the surrender of free-will and the disassociation of self which results—well-worn lyrical territory for Steven, as any listener of Fear of a Blank Planet knows. But it’s the wording of the following phrase—“waste another year”—that comes across as striking. The notion of wasting time summarizes a consequence of idleness, but the previous phrase implies that a form of trauma initiated this state-of-mind. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that this line refers to the aftermath of someone that’s been freed from the situation of “The Blind House” via the raid on the YFZ ranch.

Idleness gets contrasted with determination in the second half of the lyrics: “Fill the application, start a new career.” In general, that contrast clues a careful listener onto the fact that “Kneel and Disconnect” is a transitional track on a lyrical level. More specifically, “Fill the application” symbolizes the first step towards moving on to a new path in life in spite of the trauma suggested by the first line. But the transitional quality remains best exemplified via the use of “start a new career” as analogous to having a fresh start in life—acting as a lyrical prelude to the determination seen in “Drawing the Line.”

Until this review, “Kneel and Disconnect” was a track I overlooked on The Incident by calling it ‘filler.’ Then, I realized that it’s a perfect transition—lyrically and musically—from “The Blind House/Great Expectations” to “Drawing the Line.” Which provides further evidence that the song-cycle which comprises the first disc of The Incident shouldn’t be subjected to cherry-picking, but factored as one 55-minute unit.

  • “Drawing the Line” (4:43)

On some level, “Drawing the Line” remains the track on The Incident that carries the biggest debt towards Classic Rock influences. Part of that’s due to the rousing, straight-ahead feel of Gavin’s drums and Steven’s guitar in the chorus sections. But an even bigger part comes from the hard-rock guitar tone of Steven’s ending guitar solo. However, that energy gets tempered on two fronts. First, the verses utilize a marimba-esque keyboard tone from Richard and marching-band snares from Gavin alongside effects that give me goosebumps. Secondly, the lyrics to the chorus have been considered among the worst that Steven’s ever written—owing to the extreme repetition and his out-of-breath delivery.

But before dwelling on the negatives, let’s go into what Steven writes down for the verses, which are actually rather well-written:

Camphor crossed with lace, it is the witching hour.

Cinematic but crude.

Teasing all my feelings out, you move away.

It seems so natural to you.

The song’s opening line—“Camphor crossed with lace, it is the witching hour”—contains loaded language which clues a careful listener in on the situation. Beginning with the mention of “Camphor crossed with lace,” there’s a high degree of figurative language. First, “Camphor” refers to either the camphor laurel tree or to the chemical inside it which gives the tree its bitter aroma. That bitterness ties into the notion of the camphor “crossed with lace,” which imbues a dark undercurrent to the person (presumably a woman) wearing the lace. This person isn’t the speaker, but the speaker’s girlfriend. However, “Drawing the Line”—although a break-up song—isn’t a misogyny song. Instead, it’s a song about a man defiantly breaking out of a relationship where his girlfriend has abused (whether emotionally, physically, sexually, or any combination of the three is unknown) him. This abuse is the dark undercurrent of “Camphor crossed with lace” that implies that the speaker got something he didn’t expect from her when they fell in love.

Regarding the second half of that line (“it is the witching hour”), there are two elements to break apart. The first comes from “is,” a present-tense verb which emphasizes the fact that the speaker’s had it and that the present moment represents a moment of decision. The decision itself gets implied with “the witching hour,” a phrase that can come across as sexist considering the historical context of how systemic sexism factored into the witch hunts in the 1600’s. However, “the witching hour” refers to the judgments made in the mind of the speaker (which enabled him to make the decision) and to the execution of the plan he’s hatched to end the abusive relationship. Therefore, the thing being subjected to “the witching hour” is the relationship, not the person.

A careful choice of words in the line “Cinematic but crude” informs the listener so much about the state-of-mind of the speaker. To consider “Cinematic,” one should think of the function of cinematography and the art of carefully making shots in a film—something which takes a significant amount of skill to do. In this metaphor, “Cinematic” posits that the woman exudes a veneer of sophistication and style. However, “crude” counters this by saying that she’s devoid of substance. On another level, the whole line reflects the difference between what the speaker thought of her when they first met versus what he thinks of her now. This applies to such an extent that the speaker’s wondering what he ever saw in her to begin with.

Third line of the verse—“Teasing all my feelings out, you move away”—puts the speaker in a more-developed but flawed light. The greater development of the situation implied from “Teasing” indicates that the abusive nature of the relationship became draining on the speaker. To the point that it eventually outweighed any positive emotion felt when the relationship started. Where the character flaws of the speaker begin to emerge is the phrase “you move away.” At first, the “you” seems like it addresses the woman. Instead, “you” pertains to the idealized perception of this woman that formed in the speaker’s mind when he started a relationship with her. That quality had to “move away” the moment that the speaker saw for himself that his ideal wasn’t real.

That state of unreality links to the last line of this verse: “It seems so natural to you.” Right from “seems,” there’s a sense that illusions are at play—not literally, but by the result of self-delusion. Nevertheless, that leaves it open that things aren’t actually like the speaker sees them. Part of that’s indebted to self-delusion, but one of those self-delusion becomes ascertainable through the judgment “so natural.” That judgment is formed from what’s likely a biased conclusion that assumes her behavior is unnatural for what he assumes is ‘womanly.’ If a listener feels charitable, one conclusion to be raised about the speaker is that while he may exhibit sexist thoughts, but has a reason for leaving the relationship (her possible abuse) that isn’t sexist. However, “to you” ensures that this entire line’s a matter of perspective and that if this song were told from the woman’s perspective (or switched perspectives between verses), a different story would be told.

Steven’s last set of lines before the chorus contains some material to pick apart:

Still siren, climbing up the victory tower

Like there’s something left to prove.

I trap the beads of sweat that run between my eyes

And free the fever to move.

From the start of these lines, the line “Still siren, climbing up the victory tower allows for an allusive set of meanings. For instance, “Still” functions on two different grammatical details and—as a result—has two meanings: to mean that ‘you’re still a siren’ or as a command to be ‘still.’ Speaking of “siren,” that’s a clear reference to the feminine mythical creature which tempted sailors and lured them to their deaths—a symbolic detail which can function as the speaker having a martyr complex. Going off of that, the description of the woman “climbing up” marks an ongoing perpetual motion. Something that’d register as a niggling detail if not of the dual-layered symbolism inherent to “the victory tower.” That’s an image which unites the image of a victory lap with the notion of a tower symbolizing ambition, rendering the motion of “climbing up” apt.

Although “Like there’s something left to prove” remains the least-dense line of the verse, it’s not barren. For starters, the “Like” which starts the line implies that there’s nothing to prove—seemingly draining the meaning from the rest of the line before Steven even sings it. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the line is meaningless—except to the speaker. To the woman (or how the speaker sees the woman), “something left to prove” does have a meaning. That phrase implies that the ‘something’ marks nothing less than complete dominance in the relationship, something which the speaker thinks the woman already has thanks to the perceived abuse.

The ending of these quartet of lines—“I trap the beads of sweat that run between my eyes/And free the fever to move”—offers even further elaboration. To begin, the mere wording of “trap” denotes an action that implies a motive for doing something so aggressive—I’m not ruling out the speaker experiencing either a degree of emotional masochism or something resembling Stockholm syndrome. Compounding that is “beads of sweat that run between my eyes,” a phrase describing a sign of such extreme stress that it interferes with the speaker’s own senses. Ending the verse is “free the fever to move,” a phrase that’s rather ambiguous in that it can meant that the speaker’s accepting defeat by allowing the fever to progress through his body or he’s making a new start by way of freeing himself from the fever.

As previously mentioned, the chorus of “Drawing the Line” is oft deemed the bottom of the barrel in terms of Steven’s lyrics:

I’m drawing the line [x3]

I draw the line

And I have my pride.

I’m taking control [x4]

And I save my soul.

I’m shutting you out [x4]

And I have no doubt.

While the use of “I’m drawing the line [x3]/I draw the line” remains utterly on-the-nose, “And I have my pride” isn’t. The key to the ambiguity comes from the perception of the word ‘pride.’ One way to read that word here involves a sign of reasserting the speaker’s own self-esteem. Alternatively, a negative view of the speaker allows “pride” to reflect a sense of ‘pride comes before the fall.’

Only one a few lines later, “I’m taking control [x4]/And I save my soul” suggests something different. Look at “taking control” and don’t think it’s referring towards the relationship, but of his own life—an application which remains consistent with the idea that the speaker seeks to escape an abusive relationship. This can serve as the speaker covering his own face if one believes the negative connotations of ‘pride’ from the earlier lines. However, those negative connotations returns with “save my soul.” That phrasing calls to mind how Steven depicted the record industry as a literal Faustian bargain in “Buying New Soul” (a track I didn’t cover since it appeared on Recordings, a collection of leftovers from Stupid Dream and Lightbulb Sun that hold remarkably-well against the songs that made it onto those two albums). The negative connotation comes via the speaker’s claim that he’s ‘saving his soul’—effectively comparing this relationship to a deal with the devil. Just how negative this comes across varies on a listener’s viewpoint of the speaker.

Going off of that leads to phrase “I’m shutting you out [x4]/And I have no doubt.” The mantra-like repetition of “shutting you out” involves (if one doesn’t think the woman’s abusive) evading the problem instead of dealing with it. In that case, this relationship can be salvageable, but the speaker won’t do anything that could save it. In fact, he says as much with “I have no doubt,” that’s a phrase which exhibits another character flaw in the speaker. Namely that the self-assertion from “I have my pride” has morphed into a form of arrogance so strong that the speaker won’t listen to others again.

“Drawing the Line,” through the song’s last verse, contains some intriguing choices of lyrics:

Dreamt the sound of scissors, cutting stiches out

Then discarding the used.

Recording all my problems onto memory cards.

Your compassion unmoved.

The first two lines of “Dreamt the sound of scissors, cutting stiches out/Then discarding the used” are telling in regards to the situation. The first word—“Dreamt”—does connote that this isn’t real at the present moment, but a motif in ancient mythology (particularly that of Norse) associates dreams as prophetic towards one’s desires and/or future. That the speaker dreams of “the sound of scissors” isn’t insignificant—not only do scissors cut things apart, but the scissors themselves are quiet (if not silent). Meaning that the speaker seeks to end this relationship in a clean-break, but that’s contradicted by “cutting stitches out.” That phrase—a literal dismantling of whatever fabric held the relationship together—further paints the self-assertive qualities of the speaker as a negative. But putting a wrinkle in this comes in the following phrase of “discarding the used,” a phrase which acts as the writing on the wall for the relationship. That’s since the phrase itself states that there’s nothing new left in this relationship—implying that there was never enough substance to hold this relationship together long-term.

Looking at the second half of these lines—“Recording all my problems onto memory cards/Your compassion unmoved”—results in some pretty unsettling conclusions. To start, “Recording” marks a method of preservation—not ominous in itself. However, the fact that he records “all his problems” isn’t a happy thought considering the possibility of this song being about the speaker leaving an abusive relationship. Not only does this tie into the Stockholm syndrome from “trap,” but there’s the idea that the speaker thrives on the disorderly aspects of life which he can’t control. With this in mind, the speaker knows that his life has misfortune involved, that that misfortune is (to a degree) outside of his control, and that he’s revels in that misfortune—almost as if it were an act of surrender. Further evidence of surrender comes from the image of “memory cards” since that image conveys a distrust of the human mind’s capacity for memory—to such an extent that the speaker seeks a digital substitute for it. That surrendering also changes “compassion unmoved” from implying that any last-ditch effort will fail into suggesting that the speaker sees it as futile to even try to save the relationship. So he might as well burn it right to the ground.

Steven’s lyric choice to end the song registers as strikingly as the previous verses:

Onto others what they always do to you.

The most twisted of your rules.

Distill malaise and photograph the hole it leaves.

Running out a copy for you.

Listeners that are aware of Christian doctrine (regardless of whether you believe in it) would be quick to notice that the line “Onto others what they always do to you” is a paraphrase of the Golden Rule—“do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This line can also be taken in a secular context because the conceit behind the Golden Rule “lies the foundation of most human interactions and exchanges and it can be found in countless text throughout recorded history and from the around the world—a testament to its universality (Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil (2004)).” Regardless of where you’re coming from, the other lyrics of this song suggest that (depending on interpretation) the speaker or the woman aren’t living up to the rule. More religiously-minded folks can read that bit of hypocrisy as an implied criticism of religion—especially given Steven’s atheism and lyrics of previous songs such as “Halo” and (especially) “Even Less.” That it’s a failure (regardless of who it applies to) to live up to the Golden Rule relates to a quote from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman: “The golden rules is that there are no golden rules.” This definitely ties to Steven’s atheism by implying that any use of a ‘golden rule’ has no divine basis—it was made up by those that wrote down the ideas, which implies that all religion is purely a work of fiction. Furthermore, the idea of such a universal rule makes more sense on-paper than in practice. Especially when one person’s golden rule comes into conflict with that of another.

Further criticism comes from the next line: “The most twisted of your rules.” This states that whether a golden rule actually exists is less important than the fact that universality is a myth. And that myth—especially in an age where expression of diverse perspectives, sexualities, genders, ethnicities, mental/physical abilities, ages, and intersections of any/all the above are slowly becoming more-and-more commonplace—doesn’t hold water when the historical discrimination (on the basis of identity) has led to such wildly different perspectives/points of view that no ‘golden rule’ can ever fit all sizes. And attempts to force all sizes to fit lead to genocide/murder/rape/oppression. While what goes on with “most twisted of your rules” isn’t as twisted as any of those examples, it is facilitated by the same impulse as those—using one’s own ‘golden rule’ as a license to mistreat another person because their ‘golden rule’ differs from his own.

A more light-hearted (but still unsettling) note comes from the line “Distill malaise and photograph the hole it leaves.” Just the wording of “Distill malaise” entails a concentrated emphasis of everything wrong with this relationship or everything wrong with one/both of the people involved in it. Going further has the imagery of “photograph the hole it leaves,” but that’s more prominent through presenting an example of absence as a memory. And that absence stings as hard as anything in the relationship.

This final original line of the song—“Running out a copy for you”—proves the final nail in the coffin and supports multiple motifs of the song. Just the phraseology of “Running out” invokes the process of making the photograph—using the terminology of a natural process (“Running”) and applying it to something artificial. As for “a copy,” it points towards the photograph, but it’s also symbolic towards aspects of the photographer (the speaker), the woman being photographed, and what the speaker thinks of the subject. The thing implied is that (depending on the interpretation) one of the three aspects are not genuine—there’s elements of fakery, dishonesty, and self-deception inherent to this relationship right from the start.

  • “The Incident” (5:19)

Being the title track of the album means that “The Incident” has a lot to live up to compared to previous title tracks in the Porcupine Tree discography. So how does “The Incident” stack up against the Pink-Floyd-meets-electronica of “Up The Downstair,” the sprawling-and-moody epic called “The Sky Moves Sideways,” the pulse-pounding instrumental known as “Signify,” the nostalgic folk of “Lightbulb Sun,” the compact sprawl of “Deadwing,” or “Fear of a Blank Planet” and its all-out attack? I’d say pretty well despite “The Incident” sounding nothing like the rest of the album. Instead, the title track expands upon the industrial sounds of “Sleep Together” and fuses it with elements of classic-style Porcupine Tree. Which means that this is the title track not because it represents the overall sound of the album (The Incident remains too diverse for pigeonholing), but because it marks the crux of the song-cycle’s themes. In fact, the titular ‘incident’ was Steven’s impetus for writing the song-cycle:

“There was a sign saying ‘POLICE – INCIDENT’ and everyone was slowing down to see what had happened… Afterwards, it struck me that ‘incident’ is a very detached word for something so destructive and traumatic for the people involved. And then I had the sensation that the spirit of someone that had died in the accident entered into my car and was sitting next to me.

The irony of such a cold expression for such seismic events appealed to me, and I began to pick out other ‘incidents’ reported in the media and news, I wrote about the evacuation of teenage girls from a religious cult in Texas, a family terrorizing its neighbors, a body found floating in a river by some people on a fishing trip, and more. Each song is written in the first person and tries to humanize the detached media reportage.”

That phrasing of Steven’s—“it struck me that ‘incident’ is a very detached word for something so destructive and traumatic for the people involved’—carries the mission statement for the song-cycle. That’s true of the cult-based sexual assaults of teenage girls depicted in “The Blind House,” the woman who forgot her friend after she turned to religion in “Great Expectations,” the in “Kneel and Disconnect,” and the seen in “Drawing The Line.” Steven does mention “a family terrorizing its neighbors” and “a body found floating in a river by some people on a fishing trip.” Those are references to “Your Unpleasant Family” and “Octane Twisted,” respectively.

As for the phrase of Steven having “the sensation that the spirit of someone that had died in the accident entered into my car and was sitting next to me,” that’s a striking phrase on several levels—not just because that’s depicted in this title track. For starters, “sensation” connotes that the “spirit” wasn’t real, something which lines up with Steven’s atheism. Second, whether the spirit was real or not doesn’t matter as much as the impact that this “sensation” had on Steven. Thirdly, the motif of spirits appearing in the passenger’s seat of a car reappears in “Drive Home,” a song from Steven’s 2013 album The Raven That Refused To Sing (and Other Stories). That last fact alone demonstrates that this “sensation” stuck with Steven.

To begin the lyrical analysis, one has to look at something peculiar in the Porcupine Tree catalog. That’s because before any proper lyrics appear, this whispered set of words from Steven come about (given phonetically below) that won’t appear on a lyrics sheet:

Git de-maaaw the shovel

Wait, what?

This whispered set of lines (which repeat in the background for most of the first minute of “The Incident”) have puzzled fans as to what’s being said. Not helping matters is that when Steven was asked, he essentially invoked Roland Barthes’s idea of ‘Death of the Author’ in that—by refusing to give his interpretation of what he said—Steven implied that his interpretation matters less than that of the listener. This idea—one associated with post-modernism—isn’t new in the history of rock music. David Bowie invoked this idea (especially in regards to lyrics from the Station To Station and Berlin Trilogy eras) and the fact that John Lennon and Paul McCartney often gave conflicting interpretations of Beatles songs has led a few fans towards this lens with the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney compositions.

As far as what I think of this whispered set of vocals, I hear three possibilities—all of which have significance in the main lyrics. In fact, I think that all three of them are intended simultaneously and that Steven left this whispered lyric so hard to decipher because he wanted to keep multiple possibilities open. The most common hearing of the whisper—“Get demolished”—seems the most literal in that “demolished” refers to the state of the car after the accident. If “demolished” refers to the state of the car, then “Get them all disheveled” serves an understatement in regards to the state of the person involved in the accident—an understatement not too dissimilar to describing a fatal car accident as an ‘incident.’ Finally, the third possibility of “Get to know/maul the shadow” relates to the final lines of the song.

Once the proper lyrics of the song begin, Steven delivers the following lines in breathy and disaffected sounding way. Which suggests that the speaker’s traumatized by what he’s seen and that’s why he’s having trouble emoting:

At junction 8, the traffic starts to slow.

Artilleries of braking lights and bluish glow

Ascending in a plumage of twisted steel,

Shattered glass, and confetti dashed upon the wheel.

The song’s first line—“At junction 8, the traffic starts to slow”—sets the scene for this, but also has a hidden detail. It’s tucked away in “starts to slow,” which puts in a process which lets the listener know that something awful has occurred. If one doesn’t know it’s an accident just yet, the possibility that it can be an accident is now an idea that’s been implanted into the listener’s head. Which leaves the listener in a state of dread just like the people that make up the “traffic.” Namely that by slowing down on a freeway, every driver here has some degree of guilt—they stop and stare at the wreckage in a public setting. In essence, it’s like the idiom ‘like watching a trainwreck, you can’t look away’ since they’re doing nothing that could help the paramedics/coroner get to the victim.

But that only hints at the menace to come—a menace first exhibited by “Artilleries of braking lights and bluish glow.” That menace comes about via the first word of “Artilleries,” a function of mechanization that’s likened to weaponry since it links the leaps in technology to the development of new ways that people can die—ways which were unfathomable before that technology existed. That very idea carries symbolic weight with the phrase “braking lights and bluish glow,” a wording that—for reasons made apparent in later lines—serves as a mechanical substitute for an image associated with death. In this case, the “bluish glow” mirrors the idea of ‘going towards the light.’

The two big ideas brought up earlier (the immorality of the bystanders and that technology creates new methods of death) are united and further developed in the line “Ascending in a plumage of twisted steel.” That first idea’s entirely indebted to Steven’s careful word choice in “Ascending”—an adjective which describes the motion of smoke in the fiery crash and an aspect of the crowd watching this. In the latter idea, “Ascending” involves the crowd staring in awe at the wreckage being indirectly compared to a religious experience—albeit one founded on the worship of violence. As for “plumage,” that’s definitely about the crash. Namely because ‘plumage’ suggests a multi-colored/multi-faceted display of elements in a disordered fashion. In a car crash (especially one as violent as this one), there are so many small pieces of machinery, flesh, bone, and sparks flying about (not even counting variables such as speed of impact, seatbelt usage, and angle of impact) that a casual onlooker would assume that it’s randomized chaos. Lastly, the “braking lights and bluish glow” phrase from the previous line becomes better understood with the phrase “twisted steel.” That very wording presents a detail which illustrates that this crash was so severe that it’s highly unlikely that anyone survived.

The status of fatality becomes further supported by “Shattered glass, and confetti dashed upon the wheel.” While “Shattered glass” registers as standard imagery associated with a car crash (not as severe as the “twisted steel”), “confetti” remains ascertainable on two levels. The first implies that the victim was driving to a birthday party at the time of the accident (and carried “confetti” and other party supplies in the back-seat/trunk). However, the second makes “confetti” a morbidly-ironic word choice which emphasizes the random quality of “plumage” from the previous line. Another specific detail comes via “dashed upon the wheel,” which refers to the impact of inertia involved in a sudden stop like that of a violent car crash. Further sealing the victim’s fate is that the song doesn’t refer to an air-bag at any point in the lyrics.

Steven’s next set of lines (the song’s chorus) come across as particularly damning:

When a car crash gets you off, you’ve lost your grip.

When a fuck is not enough, you know you’ve slipped.

When the church is full, it means you’ve just been had.

When the world has gone to see, you’re so detached.

At first, the line “When a car crash gets you off, you’ve lost your grip” seems to gratuitously invoke sexual content in the lyrics where they don’t belong. In actuality, the phrase “a car crash gets you off” merely takes the connotations of religion, society, and violence from the previous lines and gives them a sexual dimension. And this isn’t gratuitous considering that there is something that spreads sensationalized reports of violence and has an audience that gobbles it up like blind followers of religion: the media. In doing so, the public’s propensity for violence in the world is depicted as a craving analogous to sex addiction. If that wasn’t damning enough, “lost your grip” turns this idea away from the crowd staring at the car crash and points it at society at large—it becomes an indication that society has become more and more inhumane.

Inhumanity becomes a quality further emphasized by “When a fuck is not enough, you know you’ve slipped.” By way of the phrase “a fuck is not enough,” desensitization gets introduced as a factor in the behavior of the crowd and in the society at large. Linking desensitization to the word “fuck” results in lessening the significance of the activity used to repopulate the species (admittedly, this can come as problematic for anyone who identifies as asexual). Also, this invokes the same concern regarding the ‘escalation of extremes’ which pervaded Fear of a Blank Planet. As for “know you’ve slipped,” that can quantify towards both the phrase “a fuck is not enough” and “lost your grip.” In both cases, the ‘knowing’ isn’t a conscious knowing, but unconscious. As in they have an inkling that they’ve “slipped,” but don’t know for sure.

The song’s next line might serve as the most damning one in the song (especially considering the shift in perspective later in the song): “When the church is full, it means you’ve just been had.” There are two major components to this: “the church is full” and “means you’ve just been had.” The first of which indicates that the crowd surrounding the scene of the accident (which has already been compared to a religious experience) goes beyond the capacity of the surroundings. There’s definitely a mass crowd here and that’s not far-removed from populism and other ideologies which emphasize quantity. The truly damning connotations come across with “means you’ve just been had,” which implicates religion, the media, capitalism, and political movements simultaneously. It all hinges on how “you’ve just been had” and what ends up making someone “had.” This is an anti-conformist stance that points out that—under the current system—money and sales outweigh human lives. Ergo, boiling everything down to numbers—such as those linked to money, ratings, statistics, and votes—serves as the ultimate Occam’s razor in that by simplifying everything to numbers, aspects of humanity are stripped away. This line does nothing less than implicate all aspects of society—the media, politics, unchecked technological progress—are detrimental to the human condition because the natural state of humanity is disordered. Imposing order onto humanity forces some into a box and results in a devaluing of life.

Similar conclusions get raised by “When the world has gone to see, you’re so detached,” but they’re now literally embedded within the language itself. For instance “When the world has gone to see” states that the media’s capable of spreading the information of the accident/violence from a crowd to the whole world. Whereas “you’re so detached” comes from the media’s effect in describing—depersonalization and desensitization of events that the wording of ‘incident’ strips humanity out of things affecting humans.

After that quatrain has one line which serves as a turning point for the entire song’s lyrics:

Got a feeling that I want you to be there.

Now that there’s a deliberate use of “I,” there’s a sign that there’s a shift in perspective—(possibly) third-person omniscient into a first-person view. As for the whole line of “Got a feeling that I want you to be here,” it’s divided into two elements. First, “Got a feeling” makes one wonder when the “feeling” came about—this feeling, while instinctual, isn’t the same as actuality. The second part—“that I want you to be here”—has a complication since “you” is left ambiguous (for now) while “there” implies that the speaker wishes that the speaker is “there” (in the broken-and-burning wreck of a car). So yeah, the speaker’s not the most-upstanding person since he’s wishing that someone had been the one that died in a violent car crash.

The next quatrain of the song takes an interesting direction:

Driving on my way to somewhere else,

I fill my lungs with a noxious burning smell.

There is weed and grey concrete like this for miles.

Dead souls in my rear-view mirror hitch a ride for a while.

The form which the line of “Driving on my way to somewhere else” takes presents a vague quality that’ should be familiar to those paying attention at home. That vague quality—“somewhere else”—has precedent via a similar construction in “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here.” That the word choice remains as vague as it does suggests that the destination is less important than the conclusions raised by the song already—along with those about to be raised. One can also suggest (especially in regards to the final line of the song) that the “my” doesn’t refer to the speaker, but to the ghost—a notion in line with the idea of any post-death existence being unknowable.

That unknowability gets compounded by how deeply-rooted humanity has become in regards to connection with (and destruction of) the natural world—the very idea indicated by the line “I fill my lungs with a noxious burning smell.” But that line relates more towards technological evolution having self-destructive effects on people. Specifically, “fill my lungs” has the imagery of mechanization invading the natural self and “noxious burning smell” points towards the destructive elements of machinery leaving a devastating impact on humanity/the human body.

Just like the effect on the human body, mechanization/industrialization has an adverse effect on the environment—as supported by “There is weed and grey concrete like this for miles.” First, the clunky wording of “is weed” instead of “are weeds” leaves one to assume that “weed” refers to marijuana instead of actual weeds. That’s a trifling detail compared to “grey concrete like this,” an image conveying that industrialization has killed any variety in the landscape—a possible parallel to the conformity enforced by the media/politics/society. But the most ominous part of the line comes from “for miles,” a phrasing imbuing a cinematic sense of scale to an otherwise-mundane landscape—if there were ever any methods to escape conformity/industrialization, they’ve been closed off for a long time.

But it’s this phrasing of “Dead souls in my rear-view mirror hitch a ride for a while” that ends the quatrain of lines which proves most poignant. First, “Dead souls” refers to ghosts in a wording which evokes Nikolai Gogol’s novel of the same name from the 1850’s—also a wording that’s a clear-cut indicator that nobody survived the car accident. Next, “in my rear-view mirror” puts a scenic detail that places the listener in the speaker’s shoes by providing specific details. Third, “hitch a ride” directly states a motif of the ghost sitting in the passenger’s seat. The last line phrase of note—“for a while”—entails that this state isn’t permanent, suggesting that the ghost eventually heads to the afterlife. However, this also leaves open the possibility that the speaker’s either imagining or hallucinating this.

The entirety of the previous line informs the last line of the song, where Steven wails this in a dynamic-sounding outro:

I want to be loved.

This haunting refrain of “I want to be loved” that’s repeated over-and-over have comes across as nothing less than poignant. For starters, there’s no doubt that this line’s told from the perspective of the ghost of the person who died in the violent crash. As for the ghost’s “want to be loved,” one should ask ‘How is ‘love’ meant here?’ while analyzing it. The way I see it, “loved” refers (in equal measure) to not only love in a romantic/sexual/platonic/emotional sense (Steven does make this line rather open), but in having a love for life itself. Keep in mind that this ghost had his/her/their (no gender given) life abruptly cut short, meaning that he/she/they are unable to experience life, feel a love of life, or experience any definition of ‘love.’ Additionally, the agonized manner which Steven sings this line suggest that the spirit’s experiencing a post-mortem ‘life flashing before eyes’ crisis-style scenario before fading to afterlife/non-existence—he/she/they felt that any opportunity to live a fulfilling life was snatched away. In the context of every thematic motif of the song up to now, the conclusion to take is that every one of those motifs add up to a horrific result: the fate of the ghost. The death of a person in the accident is the literal death standing in for the figurative death via dehumanization.

As for how “The Incident” sounds, this track’s the “Sleep Together” of the album since it starts with a full-on industrial-based sound—something thematically-appropriate given the lyrical ideas of dehumanization here. The way that the song starts—during the “Get them all disheveled” whisper—contains warped low-end synths that are allied with a drum-loop and unpleasant-sounding phased guitar coming in-and-out. Once the first chorus arrives, there are now two layers of vocals from Steven: sung and spoken-word. Following the end of the chorus, there’s a jagged metal guitar rhythm in the mix along with washed-out synths from Richard—the effect of this rhythmic addition over what came before makes the first refrain of the song utterly-haunting. When the full band finally arrives (with live drums from Gavin) at 2:22, the last detail makes for a powder-keg of energy on top of the well-established foundation. It’s no wonder that this same rhythm makes up the bedrock of the last verse.

At the point where Steven sings “I want to be loved,” there’s a layer of clean-toned guitar and a layer of electric guitar that (combined) create a sound that’s nothing short of ethereal. Yes, the rhythm section still makes up the forward-momentum of the song, but there’s genuine color in these guitar layers—something which comes as a bigger relief given how grimy the song’s sounded up to this point. It’s almost as if before the outro verse, the song had slowly ratcheted up the tension only for the dam to burst at the perfect moment. Following Steven’s last use of “I want to be loved,” the rhythm section keeps up the same bedrock as before. But now, the color comes from a guitar solo from Steven which has a similar tone to the one which ended “Radioactive Toy.” Only now, Steven’s bending these Gilmour-esque sustains for as much as they’re worth.

  • “Your Unpleasant Family” (1:48)

To some listeners, “Your Unpleasant Family” strikes as the most unmemorable track on The Incident. And I’m inclined to agree with that. It’s not terrible—it’s just resoundingly mediocre and nothing sticks out like in any of the other transition-tracks. The fact that “Your Unpleasant Family” exist as a transition track becomes apparent from both the brief length and the last notes of Richard’s organ from the title track acting as a lead-in (in-fact, the transition’s seamless). Once the song starts, the presence of alt-rock guitar chords, a drum-loop and (especially) the vocal harmonization gives this song a saccharine feel that lasts for the entirety of the lyrical portion. And then (at 0:47) live drums enter the fray while Steven plays a pattern highly-reminiscent of the “Great Expectations” guitar solo.

As for the lyrics, there are only four lines of them in “Your Unpleasant Family,” so here’s the entire playbook that Steven uses (seven if you count the parenthetical lines which are sung as harmonies):

Your unpleasant family smashed up my car (perfectly uncalled for).

Your unpleasant family, how vile they are (I crawled out of the wreckage on my knees).

It’s alright, my flower. So what did we learn? (There I found regret amongst the trees)

Snaps of a life we had in a garden, we tear up the flowers.

Looking at the first line of “Your unpleasant family smashed up my car (perfectly uncalled for),” there’s quite a bit to talk about. Starting with “Your unpleasant family,” that links to the notion that the “family” are the neighbors of this song’s speaker. To say that this family “smashed up my car” creates a thematic link to the car crash in the title track, but since this crash wasn’t fatal (like in “The Incident”), it can’t be the same accident. As for the parenthesis which surround “perfectly uncalled for,” they mark harmony vocals delivering these---but represent the internal thoughts of the speaker.

Things escalate in the next line: “how vile they are (I crawled out of the wreckage on my knees).” For instance, “vile” ratchets the speaker’s disdain for the “unpleasant family” into outright hatred. Given that “I crawled out of the wreckage on my knees,” the speaker has every reason to despise the family. But regarding that line, there’s a slight possibility that the speaker is someone who survived the car crash in the title track—not the ghost.

One thing to consider about the line “It’s alright, my flower” entails that nicknames such as “my flower” are a shift in perspective to another person. Some may imply that to mean that the first two lines are told from a father’s view while the last two from a daughter’s view. But regardless, there’s one person trying to comfort the other—that much is clear from “It’s alright.”

Said comfort gets tested in the rest of the line: “So what did we learn? (There I found regret amongst the trees).” That testing works on two fronts. The first—“what did we learn?”—implies that the speaker not only believes that there’s a lesson to learn for anything, but assumes that there’s an orderly way as to how life works—the truth couldn’t any less orderly. The second—“(There I found regret amongst the trees)”—assigns darker human emotions to the positive aspects of nature. Since the natural world is frequently symbolized as something associated with renewal, the speaker’s trauma has messed him up so badly that nature can’t achieve that role.

Steven’s word choice for this last line—“Snaps of a life we had in a garden, we tear up the flowers”—has some complex connotations. First of all, there’s the artificial connotations of “Snaps” denoting photography—a motif that’s similar to the “Running out a copy for you” line (from “Drawing The Line”). Likewise, “of a life we had” conveys memory, but specifically a point in the past which pre-dated the accident caused by the “unpleasant family.” That past had them “in a garden,” which paints them as a farming family or one who thrived in life. However, that meant nothing since “tear up the flowers” means that trauma invoked by the actions of others uproots any promising futures.

  • “The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train” (2:00)

As “The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train” is an instrumental, there’s nothing to talk about in terms of lyrical content. Regarding the purpose of this track on The Incident, this song’s definitely a transition from the idea of “Snaps of a life we had in a garden” from the end of “Your Unpleasant Family” to the warm embrace of nostalgia exhibited in “Time Flies.” In fact, the title carries rich significance towards those ideas. For instance, ‘yellow’ suggest memory being affected by the passage of time while ‘windows’ entails a look into the past. The familiar Steven Wilson symbolism of trains standing in for a movement towards the future remains present, but describing it as an ‘evening train’ creates something new. That new creation implies that this is the last possible time for the speaker to look into the past before future events sweep him away.

Musically, “The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train” marks a soothing transition from the static-y ending of “Your Unpleasant Family” to the rousing acoustic chords with open “Time Flies.” Right out of the gate, there’s Richard on an organ, but it’s not long before a new development occurs. That development comes in the form of a soothing build-up involving flute and marimba-esque tones (which are probably played on a setting of Richard’s synths). At the rough mid-point of the track, some choral bits (can’t tell if actual voices or a synth setting) are discernible. During this part, Richard’s organ steadily rises in pitch and gives a mild solo before ambient noises close out the track in a segue into “Time Flies.”

  • ·“Time Flies” (11:40)

With this track’s runtime taking up over a fifth of the suite, “Time Flies” was clearly designed to be the ‘epic’ of this album. However, a cut-in-half version of this was also released as the only single for the album—a decision I once found curious, but unsurprising since the first half of the song feels like one of the most radio-friendly parts of The Incident. Given that this is the one track I knew going into the album, this is the one track I can fully analyze.

On a lyrical level, “Time Flies” contains the closest Porcupine Tree has to autobiographical lyrics. In fact, the song’s speaker is Steven Wilson himself. However, given that Steven operates knowledge of his private life in a way similar to Tom Waits (“Most of the things that people know about me are made up. My own life is backstage. So what you ‘know’ about me is only what I allowed you to know about me.”), it’s difficult to know how deeply the specifics run. Apart from the opening verse, the whole bunch of lyrics could easily be a pack of lies that somehow manage to ring incredibly true.

Musically, “Time Flies” has so much going for it that it’s best to tackle the music as it progresses. In regards to how the song starts, there’s an elephant in the room to address about the acoustic guitar pattern that Steven strums. That elephant comes back to the idea from The Sky Moves Sideways-era that Porcupine Tree were “the new Pink Floyd” in the form of something that—on the surface—comes across as plagiarism. Namely, that the intro chords are alarmingly similar to those used by David Gilmour at the start of Pink Floyd’s “Dogs” (albeit being strummed in a different rhythm and in a different tuning). The context of “Time Flies” serving as an autobiographical nostalgia trip makes the Pink Floyd homage here (and in the post-chorus riff bearing a resemblance to the outro guitar riff of Pink Floyd’s “Sheep”) understandable considering that Pink Floyd was a band Steven grew up listening to. Anyways, this intro has only the whirr of an organ (in a similar tone to that of “The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train”) from Richard accompanying Steven’s acoustic guitar.

Over this rhythm, Steven’s first set of lyrics set the tone for the song in general:

I was born in ’67.

The year of “Sgt. Pepper”

And “Are You Experienced?”

Indeed, the man we’ve known to love as Steven John Wilson was born on November 3, 1967. And The Beatles and The Jimi Hendrix Experience did release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and Are You Experienced? earlier (May 26 and May 12, respectively) that same year. What matters is that unlike the other songs in the cycle, Steven’s own life is the subject. Which raises the following question—what is the incident at the center of his own life? Is it tied to nostalgia—something suggested by the chords’ resemblance to David Gilmour’s in Pink Floyd’s “Dogs” (albeit in a different rhythm). Or perhaps that nostalgia is Steven trying to remember pleasant things in his life from around the time of his ‘incident.’

Some further clarity on the nature of Steven’s ‘incident’ comes in the form of the second half of the first verse:

Into a suburb of heaven.

Yeah, it should’ve been forever.

It all seems to make so much sense.

A phrase like “Into a suburb of heaven” strikes a listener as poignant in regards to memory. That poignant quality is even embedded into the first word—“Into”—since that wording conveys that Steven can’t go back to this place except his imagination. As for the “suburb of heaven” itself, that’s the image of Steven’s boyhood hometown becoming immortalized and idealized in his imagination. But there’s a counter-meaning with “heaven”—since Steven’s an atheist, this doesn’t exist. Therefore, “Heaven” is indirectly compared to the rose-tinted image of Steven’s boyhood hometown—an image so distorted by nostalgia that it no longer resembles what it was actually like.

That sense of naïve foolishness of youth also appears in “Yeah, it should’ve been forever.” Especially since “should’ve” already claims that young Steven has made an image of a perfect world what doesn’t gel with reality. The negation of the effects of time incurred by “forever” marks just one way that Steven’s fantasy cannot become reality.

Another reason arrives in the line “It all seems to make so much sense,” with the keyword being “seems.” As elaborated before, sensations can be tricked since they’re not a perfect indicator of reality. So even though it may be wrong, it appears to make perfect sense to young Steven.

Once the lyrics of the opening verse are completed, Steven changes up the chords that he’s strumming in order to deliver the chorus:

But after a while,

You realize time flies.

And the best thing that you can do

Is take whatever comes to you.

Cause time flies.

One thing to consider about “But after a while,/You realize time flies” is that the song doesn’t give an indication on what the ‘incident’ in Steven’s life. That still leaves the notion implied that whatever Steven’s ‘incident,’ it stemmed from not paying heed to the lesson contained in this line. The next lines—“And the best thing that you can do/Is take whatever comes to you”—serve to contrast with the previous two. These lines—with “take”—reflect a pro-active attitude, align closer to modern-day Steven’s current mindset, and registers as the kind of mindset that one would develop in the wake of such an ‘incident.’

Following the end of the chorus, there’s a momentary appearance (at roughly 1:28) of a minor-key picking pattern of single-notes coming from Steven’s guitar—a motif that (judging from its appearance later in the song) marks the burden of time weighing on a person’s conscience. After two revolution of this pattern, the main body of the song emerges. This body consists of two layers of guitar (the acoustic pattern and some electric slide guitar), vibrant-sounding spring-like keyboards from Richard, bouncy higher-register scales from Colin’s bass, and a militaristic drumming pattern from Gavin’s that contains some of his briskest drumming outside of “Anesthetize.”

Over this rhythm, Steven sings a second verse:

She said luck is all you make it.

You just reach out and take it.

Now let’s dance a while.

She said nothing ever happens

If you don’t make it happen.

And if you can’t laugh, then smile.

First of all, who is the “She” described in these lyrics? I can assume that it may have been an old flame of Steven’s (why else would “let’s dance a while” be there?), but the lyrics don’t go into specifics. As for what she says, “luck is all you make it” mirrors the sentiment of the chorus. That this ends up being what Steven remembers immediately suggests that there’s an element of stream-of-consciousness.

That stream-of-consciousness quality becomes inextricably linked to the notion of memory with the line “You just reach out and take it.” Since it starts with “just,” the words that she says imply that everything’s always simple. But it’s “reach out and take it” that has the most-telling connotations. While the phrase alone evokes self-sufficiency, the aggressive manner in which these words are presented lead to two conclusions. First, Steven may be playing with gender roles (especially since he’s depicted as the weaker person). Secondly, Steven may be remembering these events differently than how things happened—something possible by the passage of time distorting any integrity that memory ever had.

Additional distortion of memory occurs in the lines “She said nothing ever happens/If you don’t make it happen.” She could have said “nothing ever happens,” but the connotations of that phrase—that a natural state amounts to a defeatist state—reflects how Steven’s atheistic state-of-mind means life (by default) ultimately means nothing. However, “If you don’t make it happen” does slightly counter this because it provides a method to alter the meaninglessness of life: being pro-active. The ending line of this verse—“And if you can’t laugh, then smile”—brings up another valid point: despite determination starting with looking the part, looking (like feeling) is only skin-deep.

Next up (at 2:34), palm-muted guitar chords are played by Steven (which Colin compliments with single-notes on his bass). Meanwhile, Richard begins backing chord sustains on his organ while Gavin varies up the cymbal-work on his drumkit. Steven ends up harmonizing the lyrics to the chorus over this rhythm, but adds these two lines at the end:

And laughing under summer showers

Is still the way I see you now.

These extra lines—“And laughing under summer showers/Is still the way I see you now”—may serve as the essence of Steven’s ‘incident,’ but maybe not. Especially since memory isn’t an overnight detail, but something which is gradual. Therefore, Steven’s ‘incident’ is still something with heavy consequences, but not as sudden as the rest of the ‘incidents.’ Just look at how “laughing under summer showers”—with its childhood/adolescent joy—contrasts with all the incidents. Additionally, “still the way I see you now” entails that nostalgia has frozen this person as a childhood image in Steven’s mind.

After this (at about 3:11), there’s an extended heavy section where Steven plays an electric guitar sequence that sounds similar to that played by David Gilmour towards the end of Pink Floyd’s “Sheep”—another use of deliberate nostalgia, but the chords themselves sound at once triumphant and melancholy. That triumphant effect becomes exacerbated by Richard’s organ chords being played at a fever-pitch while Colin’s bass continues the busy pattern from the verse. Add Gavin’s dexterous use of off-beat, accent-driven fills and this section practically explodes out of the speakers.

Once the song reaches the next section (at 3:48), everything crashes out except for Steven’s spooky acoustic guitar pattern (from 1:28), but now has a mild delay effect and goes through several different key changes. Along with this, Richard chimes in with understated, haunting synth layers. This entire section has a melancholic quality which conveys a meaningless quality to life. And once Richard adds an additional keyboard layer (at 4:32), the atmosphere ends up going cold, yet appropriate.

This coldness becomes mildly threatening once an understated bass and electric guitar pattern (made up of sustains) are played in a chromatic scale (at 5:01). There’s now an urgency to the proceedings since these two instruments mark the beginning of a build-up.

Such a sense of build-up only escalates once Gavin’s drums re-enter (at 5:45). He plays a propulsive, ghost-note laden beat which gets the ball rolling. Especially once he begins playing fills that approach John Bonham in terms of sheer bombast.

All of this leads to the advent of one of Steven’s finest—and most unorthodox—guitar solos (at 6:01). For instance, the guitar solo feels haphazard (in a good way) and jagged, utilizes a ton of wah-wah, and marks Steven’s exceptional use of building tension only to release it. As for symbolic significance, this guitar solo signifies a struggle against memory and the distortions of time eventually winning out. However, because that’s such a slow process, we don’t normally realize just how violent that process becomes. That violence comes right at the heart of this guitar solo and makes it seem as if Steven doesn’t waste a single note.

Immediately following the end of Steven’s guitar solo, the song moves into a recurrence of the intro chords (at 8:12). Only this time, there’s a sense of things coming full-circle after a long passage of years (represented by the extended instrumental section). Over this, Steven belts out the third verse:

How does time break down?

With no marker, things slow down.

A conference of the strange

And your family is deranged.

The delivery of these lines stand in opposition to how those in the intro were delivered. This seems to suggest that the instrumental passage is the sonic representation of the passage of several years. And the tone of these and many subsequent lyrics suggest that the years which passed were also the formative years of Steven’s life—years where a naiveté on how the world and people operate would’ve been shattered.

For instance, it’s not unimportant that the line “How does time break down?” remains formatted as a question. In essence, Steven asks a question that has no clear-cut answer. Time may be measured in minutes and seconds, but the feeling of those minutes and seconds passing by differs wildly from person to person. Therefore, to imply that time breaks “down” suggests that time flows the same for everyone, which isn’t true. Therefore, the empirical measurement of time can’t match the feeling of time passing. One instance of a feeling of time comes via the line “With no marker, things slow down.” Here, “no marker” indicates the lack of a clear goal whereas “slow down” denotes both dullness and the feeling that nothing’s being accomplished.

These last two lines—“A conference of the strange/And your family is deranged”—remains tricky since each line has multiple ways of reading it. For one, a “conference of the strange” applies to the structure of a band—perhaps one of Steven’s earlier projects such as Karma/Altamont, but that this line appeared on the final PT album carries a sting to this (even though Steven ended PT on good terms with his bandmates). However, that same phrase can also apply to a gathering assembled for various reasons—something applicable to “The Blind House,” “The Incident,” and “The Séance.”

Moving onto “your family is deranged,” that also connects to the concept of The Incident in that it could refer to a family akin to that in “Your Unpleasant Family”—perhaps a set of neighbors that Steven had as a youth with similarities to the ones depicted in that song. However, this line opens up a rabbit hole whenever anyone tries to tie it into Steven’s personal life. Not just because of unknowns, but because of the potentially defamatory conclusions regarding Steven’s family that one can draw from “your family is deranged” that we have no clue whether or not they’re true. All I’m saying is that for an analysis of this phrase, one should be extremely careful. So much so that the tie to the concept gives listeners (and Steven) an out from asking further.

Upon finishing up that verse, Gavin reemerges on drums as the song moves into the main body again for Steven to deliver the fourth and final verse:

I could tell you what I’m thinking

While we sit here drinking,

But I’m not sure where to start.

The fact that drinking’s even in the picture reinforces the fact that time has passed in the instrumental section. What may be the case is that the earlier verse is Steven as a teenager whereas these lyrics are Steven in his twenties/thirties. Not much older because the line “But I’m not sure where to start” indicates that he’s not too deep into adulthood at this point—this isn’t the present-day (for 2009, when Steven was 42…to which my Hitchiker’s brain probably could tie something in that’d likely be a bunch of BS for this song), but somewhere between that and 18.

Just afterwards comes the second half of the fourth verse:

You see there’s something wrong here.

I’m sorry if I’m not clear,

Can you stop smoking your cigar?

Somewhat of a dark turn comes about through “You see there’s something wrong here,” a line depicting a young adult Steven who’s uncertain about his own future. And he’s uncomfortable with that uncertainty. Additionally, the lack of knowledge as to what that “something” is leaves listeners to imagine what “something” is. And that leaves the song open enough that—even though there are autobiographical elements to “Time Flies”—it becomes identifiable for a wide variety of listeners. Especially those that are growing up.

Although that imagination of “something” gets somewhat deflected by the lines of “I’m sorry if I’m not clear/Can you stop smoking your cigar,” they don’t deflect it fully. It only removes the notion of “something” being a health risk or a matter of life-or-death.

Like how the second verse progressed to a chorus (back at 2:34), the fourth verse does the same. And just like the second chorus, there’s two additional lines—even though they mean something different this time:

And the coat you wore to Alton Towers

Is still the way I see you now.

As for what Alton Towers is or where it’s located, Alton Towers is an amusement park in Staffordshire, England—roughly a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Steven’s childhood hometown of Hempel Hempstead. What’s significant is that Steven says “Is still the way I see you now,” indicating that the person entailed earlier (“laughing under summer showers”) will be immortalized in his memories. This also reads as an admission that Steven can’t leave some things behind.

At the instant that Steven wraps up his last line of lyrics, the section led by the homage to Pink Floyd’s “Sheep” (from 3:11) returns. The context of the last two verses and the passage of years (marked by the extended instrumental section) does imbue this meaning with a sense that this Steven is left to stew in the changes.

Those changes may not be fully processed once the song reaches the calm outro (at 10:54). It’s a moment which has nothing besides an acoustic guitar playing the familiar intro chords and a lead guitar that has a dream-like quality. One can imagine that this section serves as the soundtrack for Steven reflecting on the state of present-day affairs. Calm doesn’t begin to describe this section—it’s practically serene.

“Time Flies” stands as the greatest song on The Incident by a pretty significant margin. On an album where most of the tracks are transitions into other tracks, it’s certainly a pleasant surprise when a song is as strong as this one. It’s certainly a track that’s in my top ten Porcupine Tree tracks, but it’s the only one from this album that’s in my top twenty-five PT songs.

  • ·“Degree Zero of Liberty”/“Octane Twisted”/“The Séance”/“Circle of Manias” (11:44)

  • “Degree Zero of Liberty” (1:44)

Even though “Degree Zero of Liberty” is an instrumental that repeats motifs from “Occam’s Razor,” there’s symbolic weight to that crushing rhythmic pulsation of a diminished chord returning to the fray. First, there’s the factor of that riff jolting listeners out of the serene outro of “Time Flies.” Secondly, it introduces another set of interconnected songs while placing them under the ‘incident’ motif of the song-cycle. However, there’s one difference between “Occam’s Razor” and “Degree Zero of Liberty”: the peaceful acoustic guitar in the middle passage.

  • “Octane Twisted” (5:03)

“Octane Twisted”—being one of only two songs on the first disc that’s credited to the whole band—carries links to “The Séance” and “Circle of Manias” (the other full-band composition on the first disc). The same chords of the quiet parts of “The Blind House” are repeated here (and given that the chord progression was used in No-Man’s 2003 song “The Break-Up For Real,” it’s a case of Steven engaging in self-plagiarism). As these chords are used on various songs throughout The Incident, there’s a musical and thematic cohesion throughout the songs on the first disc. Even if it’s not a narrative like the previous three albums.

Lyrically, this seems to concern a family on a fishing trip only to discover a girl’s body floating in a lake. But these lyrics are among Steven’s sparsest. Therefore, the full playbook of lyrics are given below:

We go following sorrow to feel your blood spilling out of the reeds there.

Give me a sign I can breathe air, blood flowing out of the stream there.

(Give me something new, please. Something I can love.)

The first line of the lyrics—“We go following sorrow to feel your blood spilling out of the reeds there”—contains three elements to pin down: “go following sorrow,” “feel your blood,” and “spilling out of the reeds there.” The first of which evokes depression in that no matter how hard this family seeks ‘significance’ (by means of undertaking the fishing trip to begin with), misery ends up befalling them instead. Second, there’s a curious wording in “feel your blood” since it evokes a sensation that’s elicited by sight or smell instead of touch. Lastly, “spilling out of the reeds” informs us how recently the girl’s been dead. By confining the blood flow to the land, it lets the listener know that the girl’s bleeding badly, but hasn’t had all of the blood in her body spilled out yet.

A response to this comes about in the line “Give me a sign I can breathe air, blood flowing out of the stream there.” For instance, “Give me” evokes a sense of desperation and denial since the speaker’s in need of some reassurance since he/she/they can’t believe that this is happening. That denial moves into panic via “a sign that I can breathe there,” which entails that the speaker’s struggling to breathe because of the stress-related panic attack brought on by the sight of the girl’s body floating down the river. The end of this line—“blood flowing out of the stream there” marks a progression from “spilling out of the reeds.” Now, the girl has no blood in her body and is beyond saving.

The harmony vocals stating “Give me something new, please. Something I can love” are from the perspective of the ghost of the newly-deceased. Knowing that makes the vague construction of “Give me something new” into a morbid case of ‘careful what you wish for.’ That’s further complicated by the desperation entailed by “please” which informs listeners that she wants to be in any situation except this one, but can’t change the fact that she’s already dead. The last portion—“Something I can love”—carries complexities since it evokes similar lines from “The Blind House” and “Octane Twisted.” While the instance of “Something I can love” carries more in common with “The Incident” (with both involving ghosts and life being violently cut-off), the musical quoting of “The Blind House” links the another song to it. We don’t know anything about this girl, but the recurrence of the riff from “The Blind House” calls the girl’s morality into question—and possibly hints at the dark sound of “Circle of Manias” representing her ghost murdering those who summoned her spirit.

Musically, “Octane Twisted” opens with two layers of clean-picked guitar that are in-tune with the verses from “The Blind House.” With some bits from “Great Expectations” for good measure. This persists until the rest of the band enters the picture (at 1:01)—Colin’s bass operating with sustains, the standard haunting guitar and keys from Steven and Richard, Gavin’s typically-brisk drumming, and layers of harmony vocals. One of those layers—told in falsetto—represents the voice of the girl’s ghost.

Once 1:41 comes about, there’s a riff that’s new but has two familiar sources: the main riff of “The Blind House” and one of the riffs from “The Incident.” Both of those songs had characters seeking a form of ‘love’ (as that character saw it), but the riff here gets warped by a different rhythm than both original forms. That indicates that while the stakes are similar, the situation is different. After that (at around 2:04) comes a jam in a new time-signature (5/4)—stabbing guitar riffs, bumping bass, energetic drums, and atmospheric keys go around for a while. Until a guitar solo appears (at 3:12) while some samples are played—creating an overwhelming situation which sounds out-of-control, but is still tightly-controlled. But then the break (at 4:02) comes at a good moment since the laid-back drums and spooky keyboards allow listeners room to breathe.

  • “The Séance” (2:39)

In several respects, “The Séance” functions as a companion song to “Octane Twisted.” Not only do they seamlessly transition into each other on the album, but they also share the same chord progression. However, “The Séance” does have new accentuations with electric guitar despite mainly being an acoustic-only song. Albeit with a different strumming pattern to the chords.

Regarding the lyrics to “The Séance,” there’s also a connection to “Octane Twisted.” Considering what a séance is, the lyrics probably concern a cult gathering to summon the spirit of a dead person. But the reprise of the lyrics of “Octane Twisted” at the end suggests that the spirit being summoned is the girl in the earlier song.

The first two lines of lyrics which Steven utters in “The Séance” read as follows:

Under gas light, the joining of hands

Chanting a name over and over.

How the wording of “Under gas light, the joining of hands/Chanting a name over and over” begins with “gas light” opens up a grey area as to whether that’s natural lighting or not. If not, then it falls into the same traps of mechanization, industrialization, desensitization, and dehumanization as described in “The Incident.” If so, there’s still an unnatural quality in what’s the séance attempts to accomplish with the “the joining of hands.” Sure, that image evokes a sense of unity, but that’s one founded on a desire to cheat death in another person. That’s a very human urge, but it’s one that almost always backfires. All of this relates to “chanting a name” since the name being chanted is that of the girl who’s body floated down the river in “Octane Twisted.” Further emphasizing the religious angle is “over and over” since that conveys a procedure akin to a religious sermon due to the meticulousness and the mind-numbing repetition in this procedure—signaling an eagerness to get this right.

One of the next few lines does come across as striking:

A table tilts, the circle is broken.

Doubting no more,

They pay what they owe her.

Motion comes about through the phrase “table tilts,” implying that the séance has already yielded results—whatever the chanters are doing happens to be working. The more striking detail comes from “circle is broken”—a phrase entailing that the participants of this séance aim to find significance by helping others cheat death. But in that aim for significance, they’ve failed to realize the potential ways that it can backfire. Also, they’re diving into uncharted waters—if no one has revived someone from the dead, there’s no telling if there’s consequences if/when that happens. It’s a scenario where one unknown cascades into several other questions—all of which are just as unanswerable as the original unknown.

That blind knowledge is exemplified in the lines “Doubting no more,/They pay what they owe her.” Namely with “Doubting no more,” which paints the chanters as part of a devoted and unthinking cult that—apart from a different belief—aren’t too different from the Mormon rapists in “The Blind House.” In both cases, their blind faith fosters a bull-headed belief that they’re not in the wrong—regardless of whether they’re behaving like monsters (“The Blind House”) or playing with fire (“The Séance”). However, “pay what they owe her”—while referring to gifts used in the ritual that’s being performed—begs listeners to ask another question: “What can possibly serve as proper compensation for the loss of a human life?”

Steven’s last original lyrics of the song do have something to say:

Disembodied, a luminous hand

Holding the air, passing the current.

A voice is channeled, a rope is uncoiled.

Flicker the light and someone is here.

The physical and/or metaphysical state of the ghost becomes the topic of interest in the lines “Disembodied, a luminous hand/Holding the air, passing the current.” Indeed, the use of “Disembodied” suggests that death robs a person of any tangible substance while “luminous hand” informs listeners that a lack of tangibility doesn’t mean that there’s a lack of form. In fact, “Holding the air” implies that form—even if it’s imperceptible to people—may be capable of interacting with the natural world in ways that a human being cannot. But for now, that’s being temporarily robbed from the spirit by way of “passing the current”—the current in question being the boundary between life and death which the séance itself facilitates.

The question of form returns with the line “A voice is channeled, a rope is uncoiled.” Simply the use of “voice is channeled” entails that the spirit must take on a form in order for any human sense to detect its presence—the spirit isn’t “Disembodied” anymore. There’s a dire hint in the phrase “a rope is uncoiled.” At first glance, it seems like this refers to a step in the ritual, but there’s a symbolic link to the Shakespearean phrase “shuffle off this mortal coil.” Where this becomes a dire hint is that the brutal sound of “Circle of Manias” can be interpreted as the spirit dragging those who summoned her to their deaths.

That idea has further resonance in the line “Flicker the light and someone is here.” Especially with “Flicker the light,” a phrase which works as an ominous sign of the deaths to come, but also posits a potential rebirth in the spirit. Regardless, the entire thing is irreversible since “someone is here” informs the listener that the procedure of the séance has worked and that the spirit has arrived.

While those are the last new lyrics in the song, there are still lyrics to this song…they just reprise the lyrics to “Octane Twisted.” In fact, the ties to “Octane Twisted” start when this song opens with a similar acoustic pattern. In fact, the musical components are similar to parts of “Octane Twisted.” For instance, the first verse has spirited vocals and folk-like guitar while the second added harmonized vocals which sound like a chant by a séance. After that, there’s a musical and lyrical reprise of “Octane Twisted” which Richard manages to bring to grandeur by the mellotron-like keyboards. After that, Moog-like synth and organ by Richard acts as false play-out that leads to hard-rock instrumentation. In turn, that ends up transitioning to “Circle of Manias.”

  • “Circle of Manias” (2:18)

Since “Circle of Manias” is an instrumental, one would think that it has nothing to offer which connects it to the previous songs. But then there’s the title. After all, a séance of people that some would consider crazy can be described (in a derogatory manner) as a ‘circle of manias.’ Additionally, the track can represent that. In turn, that entails that the nature of death and what occurs after are so chaotic that no living human being can understand it.

Musically, “Circle of Manias” serves as a brief but memorable assault which marks the heaviest moment on the first disc of The Incident and certainly one of the heaviest in the band’s entire discography. And that’s largely due to an off-beat, low-end guitar riff from Steven that sounds a lot like something that’d emerge from djent metal (for those unfamiliar with the term or how to pronounce it, the ‘d’ is silent and the name’s an onomatopoeia of the type of low-end guitar strums commonly found in the subgenre)—of which Meshuggah (a band that—along with Opeth—re-sparked Steven’s interest in metal) are considered the godfathers. Another thing which plants this riff in djent territory comes from the 9/8 time signature, but that’s also ascribable to PT’s prog leanings. While Steven’s guitar and Colin’s bass play this monstrous riff (the second-heaviest in the PT discography) in lock-step with each other, Gavin lays down a technically-challenging drum pattern which still maintains a sense of groove. At various points, Richard summons forth various layers of synths and electronic noises which render the tense atmosphere downright claustrophobic.

Apart from a break where it’s just Richard and Steven (before Gavin re-emerges with a drum fill), that’s mostly it for “Circle of Manias.” I say ‘mostly’ because the ending build up (at 1:41) finally changes up the formula to serve as the song’s ending. The change-up involves Steven and Colin playing the riff in various different keys, but the kicker comes from changing the time signature from 9/8 to 7/8—effectively slicing a quarter note off of every measure. That leaves far less room for the riff to meander, but it still feels off since it’s not an expected 4/4—the time signatures were purposefully picked to engineer a sense of unease in the listener. This build-up cuts off abruptly right at the song’s finale, leaving “I Drive The Hearse” to pick up the pieces.

  • ·“I Drive the Hearse” (6:44)

After the crushing all-out attack of “Circle of Manias,” “I Drive the Hearse” acts as a relatively-peaceful dénouement to the song-cycle. In fact, “I Drive the Hearse” ranks up there as one of Steven’s more beautiful pieces of music, which creates a somber atmosphere that still carries the listener all the way through the final part of disc one.

Still, since disc two is more of an additional EP than a proper studio album, “I Drive the Hearse” is the last track on the final Porcupine Tree album. And it’s a better final note than “Remember Me Lover,” anyway. It’s also a technique that follows something familiar for fans of Steven Wilson’s music—having a softer track end the album directly after a hard-hitting penultimate one. So it’s more than appropriate that “I Drive the Hearse” serve as the final song by the band.

Lyrically, “I Drive the Hearse”—by nature of not being about a specific event—is a little more abstract than most of the other songs in the cycle. One way to read the lyrics suggests that they’re a character looking at his own dying conscience. Despite being aware of and/or expressing remorse for actions, the character opts towards denial and/or silence. Additionally, the name of the song does link with the song-cycle’s ‘car-crash’ motif given that a hearse is just a big car carrying a coffin to a funeral.

Steven begins the lyrics to the final song on the band’s final studio album in the following way:

When this freedom stains my coat

With the winter in my throat.

When I’m lost, I dig the dirt.

When I fall, I drive the hearse.

These opening lines—“When this freedom stains my coat/With the winter in my throat”—set the tone well by way of suggestion and symbolism. Beginning with “this freedom,” the lyrics can come across as cryptic—but the “freedom” mentioned here is like that of acting morally or immorally. That “freedom” seems contradictory to “stains my coat” since the latter entails that freedom of choice is—while a nice idea on paper—a curse in practice; maybe he had no true agency at all. A primary use of symbolism appears via “winter in my throat,” since “winter” functions as a symbol for death, dying, or decay. Either way, this affects the speaker’s voice when his thoughts and/or actions come into conflict with his awareness of his fading morality, so he bottles it up.

Line three—“When I’m lost, I dig the dirt”—conveys two different things about the speaker. From “lost,” it’s ascertainable that the speaker’s in a state of uncertainty. But more importantly, “dig the dirt” informs listeners that the speaker sabotages himself by falling for an attractively-packaged bad idea—which only digs himself deeper while he thinks that it’ll work out for him.

In ending this verse with “When I fall, I drive the hearse,” Steven offers the first variant of what will become a familiar refrain. Appropriately so since “fall” entails a literal or metaphorical fall-from-grace. That fall is so severe that the phrase “drive the hearse” takes on a haunting significance. Because even if the speaker’s conscience dies, the body itself still harbors that conscience—the body itself serves as a hearse.

These next lines are what Steven offers in terms of a chorus for “I Drive the Hearse,” but these slightly change in the next chorus:

And silence is another way of saying what I wanna say.

And lying is another way of hoping it will go away.

And you were always my mistake…

One facet of the song that comes about with “And silence is another way of saying what I wanna say” is that the speaker’s resigned himself to an immoral fate. Just take a look at the phrase “silence is another way of saying,” where the speaker chooses to ignore the problem—which doesn’t solve things, but makes him complicit in immorality. However, there’s an element of irredeemability in combining “silence” to “what I wanna say.” That what the speaker wants to “say” gets silenced entails that the speaker believes his immorality (or his self-perception of it) renders anything he says worthless. So he may as well be silent.

The downsides of that become apparent with the line “And lying is another way of hoping it will go away.” First, “lying is another way” reveals itself as a layered phrase since if the speaker isn’t lying to others, he’s lying to himself. One such lie comes about with the phrase “hoping it will go away,” a mistaken belief that his immorality will simply disappear. The reality is that it doesn’t leave willy-nilly, but only through the long-term process of bettering himself—a process that can take years and will only happen from a genuine want of being a better person, not from getting caught.

A complicated line shows up with “And you were always my mistake.” The complexity is one of ambiguity in the phrase “you were always my mistake.” The ambiguity in question concerns the identity of “you.” Sure, the vague nature of this “you” leaves the possibility that it refers to another person, but also an aspect of himself (likely guilt).

Following the first chorus, these three lines come from Steven’s mouth:

Given time, I fix the roof.

Given cash, I speak the truth.

When I’m down, I drive the hearse.

The first thing to consider is that these first two lines—“Given time, I fix the roof/Given cash, I speak the truth”—undercut themselves. First, “fix the roof” isn’t a literal roof, but having that phrase follow “Given time” conveys a sense that the speaker’s procrastinating any attempt to better himself. But that’s a subtle undercutting compared to “Given cash, I speak the truth.” It uses the same construction (“speak the truth” gets undercut by “Given cash”), but the overtness of the hypocrisy—in what essentially amounts to a bribe—indicates that the speaker compromises his own morality. In fact, this also indicates that his moral decline comes swiftly and that he won’t redeem himself.

And although the refrain of “When I’m down, I drive the hearse” remains mostly the same as before, there’s a change. That change—“down” instead of “fall”—isn’t insignificant. Whereas “fall” conveyed that the speaker was in the process of falling from grace, “down” suggests that the speaker’s already morally dead-inside.

If “I Drive the Hearse” contains any lyrics that one can call problematic, it would be the ones printed below:

When this boredom wears me out,

Then the sky begins to cloud.

Sleeping with my ball-and-chain.

When she cries, I take the blame.

However, the first couple of lines—“When this boredom wears me out,/Then the sky begins to cloud”—isn’t too problematic. The phraseology of importance remains “this boredom,” “wears me out,” and “sky begins to cloud.” The first and second of which convey (respectively) the speaker’s current state of life and desensitization. The last one—“sky begins to cloud”—has some symbolism to it, but it’s the imagery of a person pushed to the breaking point.

Where things become potentially problematic is with the line “Sleeping with my ball-and-chain,” particularly with “ball-and-chain.” That wording has been a slang term for a description of marriage in older blues songs and carries misogynistic connotations since (in those contexts) it boiled down to men bitching about being tied down to their wives. But the original “ball-and-chain” (an ankle brace) and the slang term for marriage can be applied towards the speaker—who’s chained/married to his misfortune. And that’s due to his “Sleeping,” a reflection of his unconscious behavior or laziness.

There’s a chance that the “she” in “When she cries, I take the blame” entails that the “you” from the end of the first verse refers to an actual person (possibly the same person as the “she” here). But there’s something else here with “cries,” especially in conjunction with “I take the blame.” While the former states that “she” has to be put in suffering and/or pain, it doesn’t directly suggest that that’s the fault of the speaker. In fact, “I take the blame” suggests the opposite—that the speaker’s innocent. Even so, the speaker beats himself up thanks to his guilt-complex.

The lyrics which Steven opts to end this song-cycle (and the band’s career) take on an added significance:

And pride is just another way of trying to live with my mistakes.

Denial is a better way of getting through another day.

In the context of the speaker, “And pride is just another way of trying to live with my mistakes” serves as a final nail in the coffin for the speaker. First, consider that “pride” entails self-assertion and/or arrogance. Then factor in “another way of trying to live with my mistakes.” Essentially, the speaker considers dealing with the pain as more painful than putting on a mask because dealing with the pain requires swallowing one’s own pride. Yet this seals the fate of the speaker because dealing with the pain remains the only way for a person to truly move on.

These ideas escalate via “Denial is a better way of getting through another day.” First, the context renders “Denial” a synonym for “pride.” As to how pride’s “a better way of getting through another day,” that’s subjective and only true in the mind of the speaker. The speaker considers this better only because he can accept this more easily than with any way that can make meaningful changes to his life. In a sad way, it’s a lamentful acceptance that he’ll never get better—and he probably knows that now.

In terms of musical construction, “I Drive the Hearse” marks a total-180 from “Circle of Manias”—something apparent from the picked acoustic guitar in the intro and Steven’s delicate vocals. In fact, the first chorus (at 0:31) marks the first point where Gavin’s drums and Colin’s bass enter—to play very simple patterns. Second verse runs in the same patterns as the first, but now Gavin and Colin are here. Ditto for the second chorus, but there’s some added guitar chords and the distinct sound of a wood-block.

This bare instrumentation doesn’t last forever since things pick up once the full band enters (at 1:30). While playing with restraint, the song now contains bumping bass from Colin, Gavin’s steady drums, and lush harmonies from Steven. Then comes an acoustic bridge (at 1:55) that’s dominated by acoustic guitar, but contains a melodic bass line from Colin, Gavin having a bunch of ghost-notes in a busy fashion, and Richard summoning gorgeous flute-like tones from his keyboards. Until the new guitar solo (at 3:55) comes about, there’s re-using of sections. As for the guitar solo, it’s melodic and awesome while being supported by soaring keyboards, technical drums, Steven vocalizing as backing, and busy bass.

Following that, there’s a reprise of the title line with a small acoustic break that begins to build-and-build with acoustic guitar and keys acting as the role of constructors of atmosphere. All the while, Steven gives out ‘la’s’ in the outro. This persists until (at 6:00) electronic tampering begins to overtake the sound as everything else slowly fades out. That fade out marks one of only two in the Porcupine Tree discography (the other being “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here”).

  • Thoughts on the song-cycle as a whole:

This entirety of the song-cycle on the first disc of The Incident has always been something I’ve had rather mixed feelings about. Sure, it’s a matter of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, but I can’t help but feel that this didn’t have the amount of love and care that made Fear of a Blank Planet, Deadwing, and In Absentia modern-day classics. There’s also times where I can feel that Steven was growing weary of the limitations of Porcupine Tree’s sound—namely that Richard’s apparently not big on jazz. That weariness comes most prevalently on his abysmal (not a word I thought I’d use to describe anything with Steven’s presence on it) delivery of the chorus of “Drawing The Line.” For me, it’s not much of a surprise that Steven broke up Porcupine Tree after this album’s tour—I think he simply felt he had done everything that he possibly could within the limitations of the band’s sound by this point. Especially with the release of Steven’s debut solo album (Insurgentes) in 2008, an album which allowed Steven to stretch his wings in ways unthinkable in Porcupine Tree.

Regarding the music of the song-cycle, I believe a few things about the final product. One of which being that Steven might have bitten off a little more than he could chew with the concept and how he could set it to lyrics. My comment in the introduction about The Incident sharing a similar problem with Pink Floyd’s The Wall proves rather apt in more ways than one. First, both are ambitious concepts which have a few great songs (on par with the band’s best songs) that are bogged down by transitions. Second, these transitions break up the flow of the album on the studio version to the extent that a live version where the band performs the whole album (in Porcupine Tree’s case, that’s on Octane Twisted, which also contains a second disc with performances from PT’s final show—a sold-out show at the Royal Albert Hall in London) in one uninterrupted take ends up eclipsing the studio versions. Thirdly, both are the result of a single-minded vision by a musician that some term a dictator (I disagree with Steven being termed this, but Roger Waters…I’m not so sure) in regards to how much control he wields over the band. In the case of The Incident, such a single-minded vision comes through in spurts, which leaves a feeling that this song-cycle was rushed. I can’t put my finger on why, but the whole piece has never grabbed me on the level that Fear of a Blank Planet, Deadwing, In Absentia, Lightbulb Sun, Stupid Dream, or The Sky Moves Sideways have. It’s to the point that whenever I approach sections like the chorus of “Drawing The Line” and most of the transition tracks (especially “The Yellow Windows on the Evening Train” and “Degree Zero of Liberty”), I can’t help but wonder what a fully-realized version of this song-cycle would’ve been like.

The thing that ultimately sinks The Incident as a song-cycle is inconsistent quality—only exceeded by On The Sunday of Life within the Porcupine Tree discography. That’s a major factor in determining where The Incident falls on my PT discography ranking. Because when you’re talking about six albums (The Sky Moves Sideways, Stupid Dream, Lightbulb Sun, In Absentia, Deadwing, and Fear of a Blank Planet) where I love either every song or all but 1-2 songs that are good-but-not-great, those doom The Incident to a lower position in the band’s discography. But I also think that Signify and Up The Downstair flowed better than The Incident, making this album the second-worst in their discography.

That’s pretty damning condemnation, but The Incident isn’t an awful album or even a mediocre one like On The Sunday of Life. Instead, it’s a good-but-not-great album. If I were to give scores to the whole discography (including some EP’s/Live albums I didn’t cover for this series, but might someday), it’d look like this:

  • On The Sunday of Life: 6.5/10 (some stand-out tracks bogged down by too much filler, no flow)

  • Up The Downstair: 8.5/10 (the band’s first start-to-finish classic and an oft-overlooked gem)

  • Staircase Infinities: 8/10 (a five-song EP bundled with current vinyl versions of Up The Downstair is no slouch and proves that even Porcupine Tree’s B-sides are better than the album cuts of most bands)

  • The Sky Moves Sideways: 9/10 (the apex of the pre-Stupid Dream studio albums)

  • Signify: 8/10 (uneven at times, but there’s far more good here than bad; that Steven was still adjusting to working with a band might give him some slack)

  • Coma Divine—Recorded Live in Rome: 9.25/10 (the high-energy drumming of Chris Maitland [which comes as a cross between Keith Moon and Carl Palmer] here outshines the studio versions of almost every song [all from the first four albums] here)

  • Stupid Dream: 9.5/10 (the move to more traditional song structures didn’t change Steven’s songwriting essentials, but redirected them with a Brian Wilson-esque way of arranging melodies; also the coldest-sounding album in the band’s catalog both musically and lyrically)

  • Lightbulb Sun: 9.5/10 (the other side of the same coin as Stupid Dream; warmer-sounding production due to a sense of nostalgia in many of these lyrics; a willingness for more experimental instrumentation)

  • Recordings: 8.75/10 (a collection of B-sides from Stupid Dream and Lightbulb Sun which comes close to matching the brilliance of the songs on those albums---and in the case of “Buying New Soul,” it does)

  • In Absentia: 10/10 (simply the greatest album this band ever recorded; a haunting, horrifying, and poignant look at the darkest aspects of humanity that’s nothing short of a masterpiece)

  • Futile EP: 8/10 (only six songs, but a couple of them should've appeared on In Absentia--especially "Drown With Me" and "Chloroform")

  • Deadwing: 9.75/10 (apart from a stumble in “Shallow,” Deadwing is every bit as good as In Absentia or Fear of a Blank Planet)

  • Fear of a Blank Planet: 10/10 (a release that—as it grows with me—may match In Absentia; can’t recommend it enough)

  • Nil Recurring: 8/10 (this four-song EP of tracks from the Fear of a Blank Planet sessions—which were removed because of troubles fitting them into the concept—has moments of brilliance, but probably should’ve been packaged with the album as an extra disc)

  • Anesthetize: 9.25/10 (this live DVD from the Netherlands matches Coma Divine in intensity as the band performs Fear of a Blank Planet in its entirety and has room for another pretty long set after that)

  • The Incident: 7.75/10 (a bit half-baked in spots, but a fitting end for one of the greatest bands of the past thirty years)

  • Disc Two: Unrelated Songs

In some ways, the four songs on Disc 2 of The Incident make up the Nil Recurring of this album. Both EP’s comprise of songs that didn’t fit into the concept of the main albums. However, in these songs, there’s some lyrical threads which make me feel that they were written with the concept in mind.

  • ·“Flicker” (3:42)

“Flicker” operates as a striking song that’s solid, but not excellent. The most notable thing about “Flicker” is that its song’s lyrics were composed via an attempt at automatic writing. Which means that even Steven Wilson himself has no idea what this song’s scarce lyrics are about. There is also evidence and/or similarities to the technique used to write the lyrics for “Dislocated Day” and “Sever” (which I didn’t know he did this at the time I did the reviews for The Sky Moves Sideways and Signify): the cut-up technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs. Steven wasn’t the first to apply this technique—involving the individual words of a text being cut out of sequence and rearranged to create a new text. Some of David Bowie’s lyrics from the 70’s used a version of this technique. But a more extreme variant was used by Thom Yorke on Radiohead’s Kid A (2000) album—jotting down individual lyric lines, sticking them in a hat, and randomly drawing them as the band rehearsed the songs.

Considering that, my guess as to what these lyrics are about remains as good as yours. I can just as easily be spouting total rubbish in my interpretation as I as am truth.

Since “Flicker” on has four lines of lyrics, the full playbook of Steven’s disordered lyrics are as follows:

Nothing is new here underneath the sun.

All of the big new charlatans will sneer at us.

Barely a flicker of the light to come.

Only the people who always think they know best.

One way to read the first line—“Nothing is new here underneath the sun”—links it to motifs of the world and discovery. In the sense of orbits, the world can (to our perspective) appear as looming beneath the sun, so “underneath the sun” coheres with that logically. As for “Nothing is new here,” that hints at ideas further developed later in the song. Here, the phrase laments one thing that results from the achievements/discoveries/inventions/ of the people of centuries past. That one thing is that every discovery has already occurred, so there’s nothing truly original to be accomplished.

Although one can argue that the idea that no true originality exists left only applies to those benefiting from white privilege and the canon. In this regard, the line “All of the big new charlatans will sneer at us” reflects systematic oppression and indicates that any true innovation ends up being suppressed by those in-charge. In this case, the suppressors are the “big new charlatans” that aren’t that different from capitalists or politicians. Therefore, their “sneer” perpetuates systematic oppression over “us,” the general public. The lines between “us” and “the big new charlatans” are vague, but the word “charlatans” informs us that the lines have an element of class in how

they’re drawn.

Despite that appearing bleak, there’s some hope in the line “Barely a flicker of the light to come.” Sure, “flicker” indicates a minuscule amount, but that’s detailed with “Barely,” not ‘none.’ That’s important since it hints that a portion of a good future has already arrived. Which ends up being supported by “the light to come” and that phrase’s indication that good times are ahead, even if it’s distant.

That note of hope leads to an ambiguous note in the last line: “Only the people who always think they know best.” The ambiguity here depends on the identity of “the people” and with the sense that the line is unfinished. The subject of “the people” refers to either the common people of the “charlatans” from a couple of lines earlier. If it follows the “charlatans,” than “always think they knows best” conveys the arrogance of the upper-class. As for the unsaid element, that depends on how one reads “people.” If “people” refers to “charlatans,” then there’s a fall in order due to their supreme arrogance. However, if “people” refers to the common people, the song implies an uprising that may or may not be squashed. That both interpretations are in opposition to each other leaves in question whether any change will occur at all.

Regarding the sound of “Flicker,” the song begins with a moody synth from Richard that slowly fades in. In a way, it brings listeners back into the fold after the fade-out of “I Drive the Hearse.” This lasts until the verse rhythm arrives (at 0:37)—a mix of robust drums from Gavin, a wobbling keyboard line from Richard, Colin’s melodic bass, and Steven’s acoustic chord strumming. Following that, Steven sings some da’s to the tune of the lyrics while the song itself becomes atmospheric and moody. All the while, the song never gets heavier than anything from 90’s alt-rock. This whole thing persists until (at 2:08) the verse rhythm returns for a guitar solo and a reprise of the four verse-lines. Then, there’s the outro which contains the same electronic synth atmosphere from Richard as that of the song’s intro.

  • ·“Bonnie the Cat” (5:45)

This song definitely falls under the ‘disturbing’ category for lyrics—and for a very problematic reason: this song is about a pregnancy resulting from rape from the rapist’s point of view. This song does not sound chipper, though. In fact, it sounds as messed-up as the subject matter and it’s also the little details that make this get under your skin just as much as it does: the refrain of “I know what will be,” the outright venom Steven puts in his voice while whispering lines like “I hold your birth control to ransom/The cells divide and grow inside you,” Richard’s barren keys which start the song, the off-kilter drumwork from Gavin that ratchets the tension, the Tom Morello-esque solo Steven Wilson pulls which sounds inhuman, Colin’s herky-jerky basslines, and the droning guitars in the background which sound eerily like EEG’s. All of that add up to make this one of the most unnerving songs in their discography--and one of the few which succeeds at making me feel slightly uncomfortable with how well the music fits the lyrics.

But just how messed up does this song become? Let’s take a look:

Can’t feel the pain that I expected.

I still place keys in the ignition.

I know what will be.

From this first line of “Can’t feel the pain that I expected,” there’s already quite a few uncomfortable implications. At the start, “Can’t feel” suggests a numbing sensation of his (there’s evidence that the speaker’s a guy later) personality. But this gets contradicted by “pain,” something most likely referring to a lack of remorse and/or sociopathy—which indicates that the numbing is merely a front to make the speaker able to go through with his actions. Because the speaker’s use of “I” entails self-centeredness to an extent that he doesn’t care about others. The worst part comes with “expected” since the “pain” that’s “expected” is unclear as to who’s supposed to feel it: the speaker or the woman (there’s evidence later suggesting that the other person is a woman). On a monstrous level, “expected” involves the speaker getting off on guilt, self-harm, or applying harm to others.

Things get worse with the following line of “I still place keys in the ignition,” where some of the specific language used ends up digging the speaker in a deeper hole (much like the bald-faced lies that the speaker of “The Blind House” tries to cover up). Right from “still,” a specific wording reveals a dark undertone to this song—the word “still” implies that the speaker’s doing something anyway. Although it’s never stated, the implication entails that the speaker raped the woman (either raw-dog rape or not telling about a cut condom). Under this lens, the penis (“keys”) and her womb (symbolized by “ignition” as an engine which powers new life) are placed under a mechanical motif. That creates a parallel between the rape and the speaker’s view of human sexual organs in that both are perversions of what sex, love, and reproduction are under ideal circumstances.

All of that’s reflected in the lyrics and in the menacing tone of the instrumentation. But nowhere is that more apparent than in the refrain of “I know what will be.” In basic terms, this refrain comes across as a smug bragging about the power that the speaker has over the woman. In fact, “know” alone renders this a menacing self-assurance that he’s imposing power over her by impregnating her—he’s literally using a woman’s reproductive organs as a weapon to be held against them. Make no mistake, this speaker’s concern is all about a selfish display of power—there’s nothing remotely resembling love here.

The second half of the first verse reads as follows:

One thought is stopping me from sleeping.

I saw the future and it’s breeding.

I know what will be.

Just how the line of “One thought is stopping me from sleeping” sets this triad up undercuts an aspect of the song’s first triad. That aspect was the sociopathy exhibited by the speaker in lines such as “Can’t feel the pain that I expected.” It can ultimately be concluded that the “One thought” is a selfish one—perhaps there is some guilt and remorse at play, as well as some dread about the woman finding out that she’s pregnant. In which case, karma will (hopefully) enact the phrase ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ on the speaker.

But for now, it’s clear that—even if the speaker didn’t fully think this through—the speaker (from the line “I saw the future and it’s breeding”) raped the woman in an act of overpowering her. Probably out of an unfounded belief that impregnating her would make her his captive. But this line also conveys a nervousness that suggests that the speaker did this despite being unprepared for fatherhood. That arguably makes this worse since he did so without the least concern for the well-being of either the woman or the life he’s bringing into the world

Even though “Bonnie The Cat” lacks a chorus, these lines are the only thing in the song that repeat apart from the refrain:

Could be your last resort.

Like gold against your soul

First half of this cluster of lines—“Could be your last resort”—carries several intense connotations. For starters, there’s no idea who these lines apply to and what the “last resort” entails. If these lines occur to the speaker, it reflects his unfounded belief that raping and impregnating (the “last resort”) his girlfriend/wife would make her stay in the relationship. Applying these lines towards the woman tells us a few things: that the woman’s aware of her pregnancy, that she’s aware of how she got pregnant (thanks to a pregnancy test), and that—in a frantic race-against-time—aims to seek a “last resort.” I think that the “last resort” refers to an abortion, contacting the police for prosecution (despite the mishandling of rape cases), or both. Speaking of both, it’s likely that this entire line applies to both the woman and the speaker. But an unaddressed concern in applying the line to the speaker is the disturbing implication that this may not be the first time that the speaker’s put a woman through this since he may have some inkling about the traumatic stress that this puts a woman through. Not only does he have an inkling, but he’s using that as a weapon against the woman.

Even though stating that the speaker and the woman are in a relationship appears an interpretive practice, the line “Like gold against your soul” offers the clearest evidence yet—albeit a relationship that’s broken beyond repair. This comes in relation to Steven referencing a lyric from another song: “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band—specifically the part involving Satan betting a fiddle of gold against Johnny’s soul. Via this comparison, the speaker paints men as gold—a metaphor that backfires given the associations of gold with showiness and greed. He also paints relationships are (for women) a deal with the devil and claims that getting in a relationship at all heightens the risk for rape by intimate partner. All of this is awful and that the speaker has no qualms using all of this against the woman shows that he’s a power-hungry sociopath.

In some ways, the next triad of lines has the vilest lines in the whole song:

There are three things that I would die for,

But I am sure you’re not one of them.

I know what will be.

Regarding the lines “There are three things that I would die for,/But I am sure you’re not one of them,” there are things that matter in this and things that don’t. What doesn’t matter is what the “three things that” the speaker “would die for.” The important thing—that that she’s “not one of them”—cements the fact that the speaker’s a misogynist dickhead. That is, if the song hadn’t convinced you already.

The next part of this next verse absolutely cements the power-based concerns of the speaker:

You think you’ve got it all wrapped up now.

You stumble on so unsuspecting.

I know what will be.

One gets a pervading sense from the line “You think you’ve got it all wrapped up now” that the speaker’s reveling in the opportunity of having the upper-hand. If one reads “all wrapped up” as the woman successfully contacting the police and/or having an abortion, there’s a dark idea at play. That idea is that she tried escaping him, but couldn’t get away—he wants an object to exercise his power over. In fact, this line can come across as a threat of physical abuse if she does go for an abortion. This whole line points out that while it is easy to tell someone in this situation to contact the police or seek an abortion, there’s a lot more stress in a woman at this point in time. Especially if she’s also escaping an abusive relationship like this one.

In this case, there’s further reveling in power inherent in the line “You stumble on so unsuspecting.” Specifically with “stumble” reflecting the woman’s panicked trembling upon finding out the unplanned pregnancy. Especially since it could’ve been a condom that broke during the act, so trying to determine that the speaker cut the condom isn’t an easy task. But “unsuspecting” conveys that the woman thought that the speaker wore a working condom, not a cut one or one that broke. And then all of these are ways that the speaker has coldly calculated the power imbalance between the two.

Just in case anyone thought that I was pulling people’s legs about this being about a rapist, take a look that these next lines:

I hold your birth control to ransom.

The cells divide and grow inside you.

I know what will be.

When a set of lines starts with “I hold your birth control to ransom,” there’s no doubt that the speaker’s (with “hold”) aiming to maintain power over the woman. Especially since he’s keeping her “birth control” away from her, a deliberate method of denying a woman control of her own body. That power definitely tells why the speaker chooses the word “ransom,” a word implying that there’s a monetary reward to this—the speaker cares more about money/power in order to benefit himself than the harm he put her through. In fact, he’s actively performing the sort of desensitization implied by the notion of ‘incident’ in order to make himself cope with the deed—something exhibited by “The cells divide and grow inside you.” That description of pregnancy—something which (ideally) occurs with love in mind—comes across as coldly clinical and deliberately separating the emotional and human factors of the situation. In doing so, the speaker also removes (in his mind) the distinction between the emotions involved in consensual sex and those involved in rape.

In spite of the problematic lyrics (in my mind, the most fucked-up of any Porcupine Tree song), “Bonnie The Cat” ends up as one of the strongest tracks on The Incident and certainly the highlight of the second disc. That’s mostly due to the song being a showcase for Gavin Harrison’s creative, fill-driven drumming (totally worth a look at this video of him at a drum clinic going over it)—using a 4/4 rhythm which switches up the placement of the snares between even and odd-numbered measures (technically a 8/4 beat). And then everything else in the song developed after that.

Fun fact: the title came from the name of the cat of one of the band’s roadies after said cat started aggressively clawing at the band members while on tour. After everything except the lyrics were written, one of the band members (I forget which, but I know it wasn’t Steven) basically went like ‘Hey, this song’s really aggressive. That one cat that clawed at us on tour was rather aggressive. Let’s name this song after that cat!’

  • ·“Black Dahlia” (3:40)

The title of the song “Black Dahlia” leaves the impression that the song’s about the Black Dahlia murder, but that’s not the case. Especially if one asks Steven Wilson himself:

“It’s another of those situations where I took a title and put it together with something that I guess is inspired more by the mood than the specifics. It’s a song about the pressure to achieve, and make something of your life. Many years ago, Porcupine Tree made an album called “Signify,” which was all about the idea of wanting your life to signify something. The idea of ambition and achievement, and that does kind of relate back to the Black Dahlia because the victim of that case was an aspiring actress who had obviously gotten mixed up with people whom she thought could help her career and ended up paying a terrible cost. So, it’s about the idea of looking back and feeling that sense of having not achieved something or not living up to a potential.”

Comments like the one linking this song to the themes of both Signify and The Incident prove particularly insightful. Because they give us a lens to analyze the song’s lyrics. Even if Steven claims that the title reflects “the mood than the specifics,” there are several lines of lyrics where parallels are ascertainable between them and (if not the actual case) a tale of innocence morphing into debauchery and progressing into decline. In some respects, that’s the danger of striving so hard in order to achieve ‘significance.’

As for the actual lyrics, Steven’s first lines read as follows:

You have no interest in the past.

Where you came from,

Where you’re going to.

These are definitely cryptic, but it starts on a mildly philosophical note with “You have no interest in the past.” That phrase of “no interest in the past” involves a feeling that in order to live for today, one must thoroughly reject the past. Unfortunately, that’s not how life works—especially with how the present state is possible only through the pasts and its uninterrupted generations. The past is inescapable, so rejecting the past is impossible. Therefore, the only way to ‘break from the past’ is to use the events of the past as a springboard for the future. And that idea becomes relevant with “Where you came from,/Where you’re going to,” an intersection of the past and the future.

How Steven follows up the first lines proves rather cryptic:

There’s a cliché in your eye.

File the edges down,

Soon be underground.

Here, with the line “There’s a cliché in your eye,” the past comes about to strike the folly of those who choose to ignore the past—or as Kylo Ren states, “Let the past die.” The problem here is that it’s an arrogance with this person who exhibits the Black Dahlia archetype—she wasn’t the first person to ever fall victim to the violence of others, nor the first who did so out of a failed bid for significance. However, she fully believed with the fullest conviction that she’d succeed at achieving significance, which left her susceptible to being preyed upon.

That ends up intersecting with conformity via the line “File the edges down.” This line describes the process that’ll slowly undermine any figure like the Black Dahlia. Starting with “File,” one categorizes people into a box—even if making one fit into said box proves tantamount to killing them. And if it doesn’t, removing the “edges”—the individualist aspects of a person—might serve a fate worse than death for some. Just make no mistake, death—whether literal or metaphorical—will befall those who fit the Black Dahlia archetype if they approach the world in a naïve manner. The world’s cruelties will render such innocents in a state that they’ll “Soon be underground.”

Steven’s next lyrics meander about and are simultaneously the darkest and the lightest lines in the song:

There’s nothing here for you under the sun.

There’s nothing new to do, it’s all been done,

So put your faith in another place.

An idea that’s in-line with Steven’s comments on ‘significance’ rears its head in the line “There’s nothing here for you under the sun.” The root of that idea comes from the phrase “nothing here,” which—if this line is told to someone with the aspirations of Steven’s Black Dahlia archetype—can be read as a dare. A dare which results in this figure attempting to seek ‘significance’ out of spite regardless of the danger involved in her methods. However, “under the sun” paints the search for significance as a result of either nature or human nature—she would’ve gone on even if she was never told this.

Part of the search for significance conflicts with the reality entailed by the lines “There’s nothing new to do, it’s all been done/So put your faith in another place.” Just “nothing new to do” on its own gives a grim portrait on how viable ‘significance’ truly is—it’s a phrase that states that originality becomes a myth in the modern age and that the only semblance of originality comes from an individual’s personality and how they restructure another person’s work/ideas into something that suits themselves. That’s a very post-modern idea reinforced by “it’s all been done” and (in Steven’s “Song of Unborn”) “all your dreams are public domain.” Regardless of the philosophy involved, “put your faith in another place” conveys that the speaker wants this Black Dahlia archetype to get out of here because he/she feels like it won’t turn out well if she stays—her life and/or ambition will be squashed.

The chorus of “Black Dahlia” may have the essence of the song distilled into three lines:

Never seem to get away from this.

It’s all falling into an abyss,

So put your foot on the pedal, boy.

Within the line “Never seem to get away from this,” there are two pertinent elements: “Never” and “get away from this.” The more nit-picky of the two—“Never”—determines both a definite amount of time and no amount of time. But that word becomes partially negated by “seem,” that word’s suggestion linked to feeling, and the notion that feeling isn’t being—the speaker may not know that this Black Dahlia archetype may/may not have almost got away. Which leads to the more potent element: “get away from this.” That phrase connotes that this Black Dahlia archetype remains trapped in a place and/or constrained by ideas which render everything beyond her control.

Due to these constrains, “It’s all falling into an abyss,/So put your foot on the pedal, boy” become lines outlining the burdens of the Black Dahlia archetype. For starters, “all falling” entails the collapse of her ambitions and life—the impossibility of true originality shatters the myths she so fervently believed. But with the wording of “into an abyss,” a point is made that the inability to express anything at all is a worse fate than unoriginality. That’s restated in “put your foot on the pedal,” but in the terms of ‘it is better to be unoriginal than to be nothing.’

The couple of lines which follow the chorus further escalate the points:

All you know is secondhand.

The bullet passed through the cage inside you.

First off, the line “All you know is secondhand” restates the difference between hearsay and experience. It does so by means of the word “secondhand,” which indicates that this Black Dahlia archetype’s knowledge comes from being told about things and not through life experience. As for “All you know,” there’s a wrinkle—considering that knowledge is subjective and varies from person-to-person, there’s a chance that neither the speaker and the archetype know anything that can help this situation.

That inability to help guarantees the situation of “The bullet passed through the cage inside you.” Here, “bullet” can be literal, but can also serve a figurative meaning—the death that results from the bullet is a literal version of a figurative dehumanization. This becomes certain with “passed,” which paints the bullet as an unstoppable force—and a person is by no means an immovable object. This playing with literal and figurative meaning provides two meanings for “the cage inside you.” In a literal meaning, the “cage” marks either the rib-cage or the skull and for a bullet to pass through that means puncturing the heart or brain. If we take “the cage inside you” as figurative, then what the bullet passes through is the x-factor that makes up the essence of who a person is—neutralizing that results in a figurative death.

Steven’s final lyrics in this song build off of the previous two lines:

You stole the only thing you love.

So unfaithful, the drop is fatal.

There’s definitely a sense of a lament in the line “You stole the only thing you love.” Namely, “stole” suggests that the naïve innocence of the Black Dahlia archetype resulted in her cheating herself out of opportunities that a more world-weary woman would’ve seized. That carries over with the rather ambiguous “only thing you love,” which most likely refers to an ambition, a dream, an ideal, or a career—not another person. After all, Steven’s choice of words is “thing,” not “person.”

In this sense, the song’s final line—“So unfaithful, the drop is fatal”—coheres. Simply put, “unfaithful” isn’t an infidelity, but a state of being unfaithful to herself by a self-denial of the opportunity to achieve—even if it’s not her fault and she blames herself anyway. That notion indicates why the phrase “the drop is fatal” associates the surrender of dreams as a kind of death—because giving up that part of who you are is tantamount to a death of the self.

In terms of music, “Black Dahlia” relatively quiet. The song starts with an intro that’s dominated by Richard’s electric piano and contains intermittent whines of guitar alongside Steven’s vocals being processed through a funnel-like filter. Once the band enters (at 0:50) for what proves the verse pattern, the meat of the song is established—blues-like drums from Gavin, melodic bass from Colin, atmospheric keys from Richard, and acoustic guitar chords from Steven. This remains the modus operandi until the second chorus ushers in a violin-esque synth sound from Richard, along with a change in dynamics. Afterwards, it’s a mellow guitar solo from Steven until (at 3:03) there’s a laid-back groove for the outro.

  • “Remember Me Lover” (7:28)

Although “Remember Me Lover” serves as the final song on the final Porcupine Tree album, its status on the EP on disc two renders it not the closing track. In some respects, “I Drive The Hearse” proves the more memorable finale despite “Remember Me Lover” running through the sonic gamut.

The lyrics to “Remember Me Lover” provide one of many examples of tracks on The Incident which Steven Wilson offered up commentary on its meaning:

“‘Remember Me Lover’ is a twisted break-up song. So, if you have the anger phase in a relationship, then you have the bitterness phase that follows and the ‘well, I never really needed you anyway’, ‘I was only going out with you as a favor’ and all that bullshit we tell ourselves, that great lie, ‘I’m happy now that you’ll be gone’. It’s just a way of using that resentment to make the other person feel guilty. The girls that I have been ditched by have left a very deep scar. So I keep coming back to this one person in particular, time and time again. And this I feel, ties in with the idea of “The Incident” itself, that there are certain things in your life that change you almost beyond recognition, and relationships can do that. Yes, you get over it but you also don’t at the same time. If a person meant that much to you, they can cast a shadow on you for the rest of your life.”

Steven’s comments here are of particular interest for how the processes used as “just a way of using that resentment to make the other person feel guilty” are detailed in the song. That resentment doesn’t necessarily have to be externalized since the souring of relations is something that can leave one stewing over their possible mistakes. That’s the only way that this song isn’t wholly problematic because with lines like those in the first verse, “Remember Me Lover” can come across as a misogynistic song from Steven. But Steven’s comments detailing that his mind keeps “coming back to this one person in particular, time and time again” makes me think that the problematic elements of this song are an interior monologue that’s not expressed externally because the speaker knows that it’s wrong—yet he can’t stop thinking these thoughts as a knee-jerk emotional response despite feeling guilty about it. Heck, the “person” that Steven mentions can be Terumi (Steven’s Japanese ex-girlfriend who did the spoken word on “Tinto Brass” and likely the basis for the thread of songs involving a break-up on Lightbulb Sun) or it can also be the girl mentioned in “Time Flies.” Steven also lends credence towards the idea of the songs on disc two having originally been intended to be part of the conceptual piece on disc one. He says as much with the wording of an ‘incident’ as “things in your life that change you almost beyond recognition.” He also links a nasty break-up as with the theme of disc one by stating that it “can cast a shadow on you for the rest of your life.”

In regards to what the song sounds like musically, “Remember Me Lover” serves as a grab-bag of many of Porcupine Tree’s musical stylings throughout their career. Softer sounds and heavier sounds occur in abundance over the seven-and-a-half-minute runtime.

The wording which Steven uses for the first lines of the song detail the problematic elements of the song:

I didn’t want to feel like a slave to your mood swings

And I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t say behind your back

And all this shit could have happened to anyone.

All that matter now is how you gonna pick it up to throw it back.

Right from the first line of “I didn’t want to feel like a slave to your mood swings,” one gets the sense that this song’s speaker (who is most likely not Steven) comes across as full of shit and likes to make himself look better by any means. One method comes from the word “slave” being used to paint himself as a victim. Another comes from “mood swings,” but that’s probably more insidious than “slave.” That’s because “mood swings” also registers as the speaker blaming the other person’s womanhood, her hormones, and/or her periods—a blatantly misogynistic comment. This misogyny most likely isn’t Steven’s own thoughts on the matter. After all, this is a person who’s quoted as such in an interview from 2017 (when asked about domestic terrorism based upon religion):

Unfortunately, that’s one of the cancers at the very heart of the human species, that if you don’t agree with me, I’m going to destroy you. That is religious fundamentalism in a nutshell, that’s terrorism in a nutshell. It’s the same with racism, it’s the same with any prejudice, whether it’s homophobia, sexism or whatever it is, that is a cancer and I think that the human race really should have evolved beyond by now, but we haven’t.

With that quote in mind, “Remember Me Lover” comes across as a song where Steven tries to understand what fuels sexism and how differently the situation of his bad break-up could’ve gone if he’d followed the path of this song’s speaker.

The next line—“And I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t say behind your back”—catches the speaker in another bald-faced lie. That fact makes “behind your back” an ironic phrase. Especially since this line comes from an ideal of adhering to an outdated concept of ‘honor,’ but the lie regarding “behind your back” results in the speaker breaking that concept (unknowingly or not).

Line number three—“And all of this shit could have happened to anyone”—further illustrates the flaws of the speaker. Sure, “all of this shit” suggests a nagging relationship. But to say that it “could have happened to anyone” speaks on multiple fronts. First of all, he’s shifting the blame off of himself onto her. Second, it reminds a listener of how widespread sexism is. Lastly, it points out that he’s completely oblivious to the sexist madness that he’s perpetuating.

All of that factors into the last line of the quartet: “All that matters now is how you gonna pick it up to throw it back.” That’s a line outright stating that the speaker believes anything he can say or do will be met with retaliation. Peeling back further, that reveals both a power imbalance and a fear of losing power. In this case of the woman gaining a backbone, equality feels like oppression to the speaker.

How Steven words this pre-chorus continues the problematic details of the verse:

It’s so hard to get along.

I always know what you’re gonna say.

This too: I hated you.

I wish you’d learn to keep your mouth shut.

The gist of “It’s so hard to get along” comes across as the speaker lamenting about the lack of power over her while redirecting the blame onto her and painting himself as the victim. These ideas have been iterated before, but they escalate with the line “I always know what you’re gonna say.” The “always” suggests that the speaker’s misbehavior and control-freak tendencies are ongoing. As a result, he’s heard her reaction (“what you’re gonna say”) an endless amount of times. So many times that it’s predictable to him, he no longer cares, and it doesn’t faze him in the slightest.

The next line—“This too: I hated you”—reveals two new details. The first—stemming from “This too:”—boils down to an admission of hatred to himself or yelling the words “I hated you” to the woman. As for “I hated you,” it’s vital that that ‘hate’ is in the past-tense because that entails that the speaker never loved this woman to begin with. Therefore, the only thing this relationship had as a basis was a façade founded upon power imbalance. In a way, that’s akin to “Bonnie The Cat” except that this song’s speaker doesn’t use a woman’s reproductive organs as a weapon against her. But make no mistake, “I wish you’d learn to keep your mouth shut” comes as all the proof one needs to determine that the speaker wants total control and dominance over the woman in this relationship.

Verse two of “Remember Me Lover” illustrates the hypocrisy of the speaker in sterling fashion:

I never meant to start anything that I couldn’t finish.

Now I gotta be the one to turn away, it’s time to react.

I meant every word that I said. Yeah, I really did.

But you gotta understand that I was sleeping then.

So relax

There are a few ways to read the line “I never meant to start anything that I couldn’t finish.” One way involves a creepy bit of foreshadowing regarding the implications of the dark and heavy-as-hell instrumental section which ends the song. Another pertains to the speaker blaming himself, but not for what he should be blaming himself for. Namely, the speaker views a failure to assert total dominance over the woman as synonymous to a failure at being a man. Needless to say, that’s an outdated, wrong, and restrictive view of ‘being a man’ that’s slowly fading away in 2018. But a situation like the one depicted in this song shows us that it hasn’t gone away just yet.

All of that makes the lines “Now I gotta be the one to turn away, it’s time to react” and “I meant every word that I said” reek of irony. In the case of the former, “react” proves ironic since him accusing her of reacting earlier in the song makes him a colossal hypocrite. Ditto to “turn away” since it’s implied that she stayed with him despite his bullshit. As for “I meant every word that I said,” the hypocrisy of the previous line makes this line sound as hollow as anytime Donald Trump says “Believe me.” In fact, the speaker pulls a Trump-like tactic in “Yeah, I really did” via using his overconfidence and egotism to try to cover up a lie. But like the speakers of “Bonnie The Cat” and “The Blind House,” listeners can see right through his lies.

It’s the next line—“But you gotta understand that I was sleeping then”—that contains a degree of ambiguity. For that ambiguity, the crucial word is “sleeping.” That word can refer to a literal sleep or a dulled state-of-mind. However, the accusatory tone of Steven’s voice reveals another meaning to “sleeping”—the speaker’s been having an affair and has been caught. The fact that the speaker expects this to be hunky-dory emphasizes the power imbalance in the relationship. That imbalance interferes with the ability to reason in the line “So relax.” That’s because the speaker can’t see (or chooses not to see) that the woman’s probably right in calling out his affair. In fact, telling her to “relax” is synonymous to claiming that she’s being overly ‘emotional’—a tactic deployed to de-legitimize her valid points.

These lines that make up the chorus have the speaker in a place which destroys any remaining integrity he had:

I walked away, now remember me lover.

I told you lies, now remember me lover.

I took your money, remember me lover.

I ruined your life, now remember me lover.

The repetition of “now remember me lover” alone says something about the speaker. It reflects a cocky self-assured quality in the speaker. Almost as if he believes that the lover owes him something out of courtesy after the schism becomes irreparable. Unfortunately for him, that’s not how life works.

As for the rest of the chorus, there’s four elements to consider: “I walked away,” “I told you lies,” “I took your money,” and “I ruined your life.” The first of these—“I walked away”—serves as the speaker admitting to himself what he’s about to do in order to psych himself up for when the time comes. Then comes “I told you lies” to confirm that he’s full of shit, but we already knew that. Coming in third is “I took your money,” which reads as a matter-of-fact statement that could serve as a self-confession, but a hollow one because the power imbalance means he doesn’t have to atone for this act. That power imbalance fuels the viewpoint behind “I ruined your life,” a statement that spoken with zero remorse because the speaker’s misogynist views allow him to see her as lesser.

The final set of original lyrics of the song outline the true concerns of the speaker:

I’ve been through this with you about a hundred times.

Agree to disagree, start again, with our lives.

Then every single morning I wake up and you’re still there.

But tomorrow, you will be alone and that is all you deserve.

This quietly spoken line of “I’ve been through this with you about a hundred times” contains further lies from the speaker. First, there’s “with you” throwing a smokescreen over things by creating the illusion that any unity existed in this relationship at all. More importantly comes “about a hundred times.” In essence, “hundred” seems like a stock or placeholder type of number which exaggerates the amount of times this has happened. The purpose of doing so would be for the speaker to stroke his own ego in regards to how many times he’s dominated over arguments with her.

The second line—“Agree to disagree, start again, with our lives”—carries one crucial phrase in the context of the outro. That phrase—“start again”—applies only towards himself. Namely that he believes that he can start over as if this relationship never happened and he couldn’t give a rat’s ass if she can’t recover. The instrumental outro and what it can musically represent makes this idea frightening. Another line made harsher by the murderous implications of the outro is “Then every single morning I wake up and you’re still there.” This focus on her can indicate four things: trauma, guilt, the hatred of her reaching a fever-pitch, or the speaker’s brain snapping.

With all that in mind, the last line—“But tomorrow, you will be alone and that is all you deserve”—isn’t a comforting one. The idea that murder is musically evoked in the outro makes “tomorrow” an ominous choice of words—as well as “alone” given Steven’s atheistic mindset possibly fueling this wording. But at the end comes the engine behind the hatred and eventual murder: “that is all you deserve.” That’s a phrase with two ways of reading it: that we take it at face-value and consider the woman an unfaithful lover (just like the speaker) or that the speaker’s victim-blaming. Or perhaps it’s both with a dash of hypocrisy on the part of the speaker since he was previously caught in an affair. All that I know is that a phrase like “that is all you deserve” is—in this context—fueled by a deep-seated misogyny that leads to a dark path.

On the note of sound, “Remember Me Lover” introduces itself with some laid-back guitar from Steven and spacy synths from Richard. This persists until Colin’s bass enters (at 0:33) with sustains, setting up the sound for the first verse. That pattern only changes up in the first pre-chorus (at 1:02) with some faint organ tones from Richard and some brighter-sounding guitar from Steven.

While the second verse (beginning at 1:24) doesn’t have much different being played by Steven, Colin, or Richard, the presence of a drum loop provides a musical representation of the inhumanity of the thoughts expressed by the speaker. The coldness of that inhumanity makes the shift to the chorus (at 1:52) a dynamic moment with the entry of Gavin’s live drums and a Dylan-esque switch from acoustic to electric guitars. It’s a rather bombastic chorus loaded to the brim with sounds from organ, keys, drums, bass, guitar, and vocals.

Following the chorus comes an electric-guitar laden post-chorus (at 2:38) which then follows a brief bridge (at 2:57). Afterwards (at 3:03), the song leaps into a heavy metal guitar riff from Steven that’s made all-the-more sinister by Richard’s low-end piano and militaristic by Gavin’s steady drumming. One that riff runs its course, there’s a break (at 3:38) involving acoustic guitar and a drum loop which forms the basis for the third verse until the second chorus (at 4:22) marks the re-entry of the full band for the chorus and the post-chorus.

But once the post-chorus wraps up is where this song truly gets into pitch-black territory. Since the heavy metal riff returns (at 5:32) before a brief respite (at 6:02) offers a glimmer of hope. That respite dies with a muted riff on Colin’s bass and Steven’s guitar (at 6:09) that—upon exploding (at 6:21)—becomes one of the darkest-sounding riffs in the Porcupine Tree discography. Considering the misogynist leanings of this song’s speaker, this dark and aggressive riff comes across as a point of the song’s story—the speaker choosing to murder the woman. Partly because this contrast between soft and heavy has been executed in one other place of the PT discography: “Gravity Eyelids,” another song with a murder implied by the heaviness of the instrumentation. Anyways, this riff—complete with Steven’s discordant lead guitar and Gavin’s brisk drumming—persists for a while until Richard adds (at 7:00) a keyboard/synth bit which renders this section even spookier as it plays out until the ending.

The closing track to the final Porcupine Tree album, “Remember Me Lover” has a lot of work to do. Work which wasn’t known at the time of the album’s release. But the song mostly succeeds in-spite of some rather problematic lyrics.

  • ·Final Thoughts:

The Incident—more so than any other album in the Porcupine Tree—served as an ambitious set of material. Not only does the 55-minute conceptual piece feel like the apex of the band’s progressive muscle, but it also marks the most-complex set of material. Make no mistake, apart from On the Sunday of Life, The Incident is just about the last album I’d recommend to someone new to Porcupine Tree. And that’s due to how the densely-interconnected nature of the titular conceptual piece is designed as a large whole—not to be divided in tracks. While the result remains compelling as a whole, it’s a daunting task even for seasoned veterans of Steven’s music. And unlike a similarly-dense album like Hand. Cannot. Erase., The Incident can’t be enjoyed on a passive level (part of the reason why Hand. Cannot. Erase. remains as strong as it does is because each song works well as a standalone song). That’s not a bad thing—just that it requires a different mindset listening to this than almost any other Porcupine Tree album, one that involves a very close listen.

Unfortunately, it’s also uneven (especially the additional EP that serves as Disc Two). Although it features some strong material from the band (“Occam’s Razor/The Blind House,” “The Incident,” “Time Flies,” “Octane Twisted/The Séance/Circle of Manias,” “I Drive the Hearse,” and “Bonnie The Cat”), it also has some weaker-than-usual material (most of the transitions, “Flicker,” and “Black Dahlia”). But overall, the album’s another solid release by the band—even if it’s one of the band’s weakest albums—that can serve as a grower for many. Some have called this the band’s greatest album—a claim that, while I disagree with (since that’d mean it’d have to be on-par with any of the previous five releases), I can also see why some think that.

As for whether I think Porcupine Tree will ever reunite, I think that ship has sailed. Although a Porcupine Tree reunion would be (to me) like a Prog-rock GnR reunion, I can’t see Steven doing that. If anything, Steven’s way too content with the just how many different directions he can express himself musically as a solo artist. That’s not a knock on Porcupine Tree, but a sign that Steven may have started to find himself constrained within the structure of a band—particularly true being that In Absentia marked the last major shift of the band’s sound. With The Incident serving as the most ambitious album in the band’s discography, one can’t help but feel that (with hindsight) Steven had taken Porcupine Tree’s sound as far as he could. Technically, that’s true of Fear of a Blank Planet, so ambition was the last thing Steven could do to tweak the sound. Therefore, it’s probably for the best that Steven ended Porcupine Tree after this—had they continued, it would’ve been diminishing returns and become increasingly clear that Steven showed no interest. For Steven to explore himself as a musician better, Porcupine Tree had to end.

Regarding the band’s ending, Porcupine Tree’s break-up (even if it’s sometimes been termed as an ‘extended hiatus’) wasn’t a bitter one. Mostly because there have been occasions where at least two former members have collaborated with each other. Such occurrences include having Gavin record the (rather sparse) drums on 2012’s Storm Corrossion and Steven appearing at the end of Richard’s set at the Royal Albert Hall (Richard was the opening act for a sold-out show by Steven himself) in March 2018 (a show that was recorded for the late 2018 live album Home Invasion [which I'm definitely excited for]). That last one is—to my knowledge—the first time Steven’s performed live with any former Porcupine Tree members since that band’s final show on October 14th, 2010.

On the topic of the projects of former members, there’s some interesting directions—not counting Steven’s since that’ll be covered later. Gavin did get the quickest rebound—immediately getting snatched up by Robert Fripp to fill the drummer’s chair for the new line-up of King Crimson—while also showing up elsewhere. Colin and Richard have both kept relatively low profiles by returning to the jazz and ambient-based projects that form the base of their sounds in their Porcupine Tree days.

As for Steven, that’ll be the topic at hand for next time.

Up Ahead:

* Steven Wilson - "Insurgentes" (November 26, 2008)

* Steven Wilson - "Grace For Drowning" (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)

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