Where Worlds Collide

Even the indie-obsessed BBC has noticed Porcupine Tree’s chart success

Observant chart watchers may have noticed an unfamiliar - and unusual - name in the UK top 30 album chart this week.

Among a flurry of new entries from Peter Andre, Jay-Z, Pixie Lott and David Gray is an album by a band that has been around longer than any of them: Porcupine Tree.

Porcupine who?

Yes, Porcupine Tree’s new album, “The Incident”, has charted at No 23, in the same week as Muse, who despite being in the NME are proggier than a very prog thing, are sitting at No 1.

Of course, some people are never happy…

Bad news: the article is a remix of the usual “prog’s back!” non-story and, worse, SW doesn’t reject the label this time.

Personally I thought Steve Wilson’s “we’re not prog” was always rather silly, and my opinions of genre gerrymanderers who make a distinction between “progressive” (i.e. music they like) and “prog” (i.e. music they don’t) is well-documented. I’m not interested in reopening that argument yet again. Post self-justifying rants in the comments and I will track you down and force you to listen to Arena…

As for the album itself, it’s certainly one of those that takes quite a few listens to get into.

I’m about to upgrade to a new version of WordPress - if things go strange for a while, that’s why….

Update: Upgrade seems to have gone OK

Haven’t seen ye olde Five Songs Meme on the blogoljfacebooksphere for ages, so it’s time to set it shambling forth again.

It’s quite simple - just list five songs you’ve been listening to a lot lately. Give the reasons why if you want; that bit is entirely optional.

• Breathing Space - Questioning Eyes
  Some people have claimed that a song is diminished if you know who a song is about. I think that’s total cobblers. This is a real lump-in-the throat song precisely because I know what it’s about.
• Barclay James Harvest - Poor Man’s Moody Blues
  I never saw BJH in their prime, but I bought their 1987 live album “Live Dates”after seeing the John Lees Barclay James Harvest at the Cambridge Rock Festival last month. It’s got a lot of the standards like ‘Child of the Universe’, ‘Mockingbird’ and ‘Hymn’, but it’s this one that particularly stood out for me.
• Blackfield - Hello
  Closing song from their self-titled first album. Blackfield are very good at melancholy.
• Parade - The Diamond
  I need to do a full review of “The Fabric”. This is one of my favourite songs, some heart-melting vocals from Anne-Marie Helder, and great guitar playing from a certain Mr Josh.
• Arena - Purgatory Road
  “When the Martians land on London town”. Arena are the Saxon of prog; It’s corny as hell, but knows it’s corny, and doesn’t care. This one stands out from the album “Pepper’s Ghost”.

I’m not tagging anyone - If you want to pick up the meme, post to your own blog, livejournal, facebook wall or whatever and link to it in the comments.

Over the past three years, York’s Breathing Space have developed from being a side-project of Mostly Autumn’s Iain Jennings and Olivia Sparnenn to become a significant band in their own right. While some people may have feared the worst following guitarist Mark Rowen’s departure from the band just before the band went into the studio, the band have not only delivered a strong album, but have managed to top 2007′s excellent “Coming Up for Air”.

As with the last album, Iain Jennings’ production is crystal clear. Olivia Sparnenn gets better and better as a singer with some wonderful vocals throughout, and everyone else’s playing as the top of their game. For the album they’ve drafted in Mostly Autumn’s Liam Davidson to play guitars, and his more traditional rock-style playing fits perfectly. Without Mark Rowen and John Hart we may have lost the jazz-rock elements from their sound, but the album is still a lot more varied than it’s predecessor. Songs ranges from the guitar-based hard rockers and emotional piano-and-vocal ballads to big prog-tinged epics. There’s even a bit of the dance music elements which featured on the first album.

It’s difficult to single out the high points; there’s Olivia’s soaring vocals on “Clear” and “The Night Takes You Home”, There’s the atmospheric ballad “Dusk”. “Run From Yourself” combines a dance-pop rhythm with some fantastic Jon Lord-like Hammond organ playing from Iain Jennings. And the closing number “Questioning Eyes” is simply a masterpiece in the same league as Iain’s Mostly Autumn classics “Carpe Diem” and “The Gap Is Too Wide”; real lump-in-the-throat stuff, with some evocative cello playing from Charlotte Scott, some superb guitar from Liam, and an emotionally powerful vocal performance from Olivia Sparnenn.

This is shaping up as a very good candidate for album of the year. It’s certainly the best thing to come out of York for the past three or four years.

There are some brief sound clips on the band’s website, and the album can be ordered here.

While I was in Leicester on Saturday morning after Breathing Space‘s gig the night before, I went for a walk around the city, and saw the famous bowstring bridge on the west side of the city.

This bridge is one of the last surviving bits of the Great Central’s London extension in Leicester. It’s scheduled for demolition to make room for an expansion of De Montford University’s sports department.

As chronicled on Jonathan Calder’s Liberal England blog, there’s been a strong local campaign to save the bridge, but it’s looking increasingly likely that Big Money and sports jocks are going to trump preservation of Britain’s victorian industrial heritage.

On Friday morning I got up a few minutes early to photograph the steam-hauled Scarborough Flyer on it’s way from Crewe.

I was expecting the advertised loco, A4 pacific 60009 “Union of South Africa”. But what turned up was LMS No 6201 “Princess Elizabeth”.

There were a lot of people on the station with cameras.  I think I was probably the only one under the age of 65. I was certainly the only person wearing a DEMU “No Kettles” t-shirt.

So the most overrated band in all music history have finally split up. Even Adolf Hitler is upset about it. The NME will need someone new to put on the cover every third week.

The Guardian’s increasingly risible Tim Jonze claims that they were arguably Britain’s greatest ever rock’n'roll band. I’m guessing fans of bands like The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or The Clash would rather dispute that fact. The truth is that Oasis were just lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and were at the receiving end of so much undeserved hype from hacks like Jonze that it completely went to their heads. Yes, they did a couple of decent albums, but even most their devoted fans admit that they were just coasting after their early years.

Far from being the new Beatles, the reality is that (in my opinion of course) Oasis were not as good a band as Saxon.