"It's about people on
the fringes, on the edges of humanity and society. […] Why are they unable to
empathize? It’s sort of a metaphor - there's something missing, a black hole, a
cancer in their soul. It's an absence in the soul."
Progressive rock is much
like pop in that it relies almost entirely on presentation. Regardless of the
relative minimums of technical proficiency and sex appeal (respectively), both
genres strive to present a flashy, impressive exterior with little attention
spent on providing meaningful emotional content. Lots of sound and very little
fury, in other words.
In fact, I would go so far
as to say that the tightly arranged, technically pruned sounds of present-day
plastic pop was originally inspired by the similarly controlled sounds of 70s
progressive rock. Granted, prog achieved that perfected sound through careful
production, obsessive songwriters, and extremely talented musicians while pop
simply runs raw sound through computer programs, but the end result of glossy
product is essentially the same. It’s the aural equivalent of comparing a
photograph of a naturally beautiful woman with light makeup to a homely woman
airbrushed and Photoshopped to hell and back; the methods may be different,
with prog being a playground for musicians and pop for producers, but the final
images are fairly similar.
The main difference between
those images, in a more complex metaphor, would be the content. Progressive
rock, thanks mainly to the boundless influence of Led Zeppelin, tends to be
descriptive. It’s no mistake that prog and fantasy imagery often gets linked by
artists and record sleeve designers alike; the two fields are similar in that
they’re trying to build extremely detailed worlds that can be marveled at by
the consumer.
In most cases, that
obsessive detail is used to mask a fundamental lack of character and emotional
resonance. My experience of fantasy stories is that they’re populated by
characters who exist in order to comment on their environment and experience
large plot events like wars or celestial attacks, making them only slightly
more impressive than a well-written travelogue. The authors often seem more
concerned with showing off how far back they’ve sketched a family tree than to
actually flesh out the relationship between a mother and child, or they’ve
created such a complex network of alliances that the reader is only able to
keep track of characters with a flowchart. It’s impressive, yes, but reading it
feels pointless.
Similarly, a great deal of
progressive rock seems concerned with extremely intricate melodies played on as
many instruments as possible. It’s as if all of the finalists from a high
school talent show formed a band; songs are written not for cohesive effect but
as an opportunity for solos, a technique stolen from bebop rendered slick by
70s production and limp by limited imaginations. Many prog songs resemble a
walled garden of overgrown, brightly colored flowers that the artist chaperones
you through on a tightly controlled walkabout.
Seeing as none of the above
applies very well, if at all, to In
Absentia, I'm at a loss as to why critics and prog fans alike have
seemingly formed a consensus that this album is a crown jewel in
modern progressive rock. Granted, if my genre of choice were essentially
limited to Tool and The Mars Volta I'd probably be desperate for some new
options myself.
Since I obviously can’t be
wrong about my contrarian classification, I have to put it down to critics
ascribing the band’s past upon their present. Porcupine Tree has a long history
as a Pink Floyd-esque group typified by elaborately constructed songs with
arcane lyrics. Albums like Up The Downstair (which echoes the Led
Zeppelin album In Through The Outdoor) or The Sky Moves Sideways
are certainly prog-oriented, with the latter going so far as to feature
multi-movement, 10-minutes-plus songs typical of bands like Rush. The band even
moved back into this territory following In Absentia, with Fear Of A
Blank Planet splitting 50-odd minutes into 5 tracks, one of which even
featured Rush’s guitarist, Alex Lifeson. The band itself also features Richard
Barbieri, of the classic art rock group Japan, as a keyboardist and sound
engineer, giving them further prog cred.
Even if Porcupine Tree can
be considered a prog band, that doesn’t necessarily make In Absentia a
prog album. This album is the odd one out in the band’s discography in that
it’s both extremely personal and relatively down to earth. Only three of the
songs on the album go over 6 minutes in running length, with two of those
topping 7. It only features a single instrumental (“Wedding Nails”) as well as
a borderline case (“.3” which only features lyrics in its coda) and no
multi-movement tracks are in evidence. More interesting still is that every
song of the album with identifiable people is in the first-person, something
that I see as quite rare in progressive rock.
Considering that much of
prog rock is based in elaborate construction, there’s little room for any kind
of personal or emotional statements that aren’t clouded over by bombast or
tortuous analogy. In Absentia bucks this with songs that are simply not
only in lyrics but also in musical composition; “Heartattack In A Layby” and
the final track, “Collapse The Light Into Earth”, are both minimalist pieces
with simple, direct lyrics, the former being a plea for escape and the latter a
statement of stubborn strength that wouldn’t be out of place on Doug Paisley’s
debut.
More interesting to me are the ways Wilson tackles his idea without resorting to the murderer/killer cliché. If you’ve heard “The Sound Of Muzac” already you probably guessed that it was my favorite track on the album for several years, particularly when I bought the album in my early teens. It’s a recreation of most of my critiques and gripes about modern pop music with a more vicious edge and a lovely tune. In terms of the album’s theme, it’s pre-chorus gives you the relation: “Soul gets squeezed out/Edges get blunt/Demographic/Gives what you want.” It’s a snide juxtaposition on Wilson’s part, creating the implication that pop music is as fundamentally broken/lacking as the psychopaths that haunt out trashy TV shows.
As much as I enjoy that song, the most oblique track on the album (not counting the songs with minimal, and thus nearly impenetrable lyrics), “Trains”, is the one that gets most of my attention now. While most of the album is dominated by a metal-influenced sound undercut by Wilson’s prog-derived pop sensibilities, “Trains” is more in the vein of the aforementioned minimalist tracks like “Collapse The Light”; though more ornate and flush, the former keeps to an acoustic guitar rather than the heavily distorted electric that sets jagged lines through tracks like “The Creator Has A Mastertape”. While it’s hardly easy to parse (Wilson himself famously refuses to explain its meaning in any detail), the chorus, “Always the summers are slipping away/Find me a way for making it stay,” hints at the idea of lost childhood that Arcade Fire sings about in big, bold letters. Thematically speaking, the dimming of memory that the song (probably) talks about is certainly pertinent, as is the idea of a lost innocence. It’s an idea even more strongly hinted at by the album’s very first lines, “A mother sings a lullaby to a child/Sometime in the future the boy goes wild/And all his nerves are feeling some kind of energy.”
That opening verse is indicative of the album as a whole; Wilson offers no real explanation or origin story for the black holes he maps on In Absentia. This is more Silence Of The Lambs than Hannibal Rising, which allows the album to keep things grounded in emotions rather than imagined history. It also allows the music, which is uniformly excellent, to do the heavy lifting on many of these songs. Lyrics like those on “Strip The Soul” are given weight and effect beyond the words thanks to strong, dark atmosphere. Similarly, the potentially bombastic lyrics of “The Sound Of Muzak” are undercut by the shift into the major-scale in the choruses, lending the song a measure of variety.
Gloom and doom, in my opinion, is largely pointless on its own. As every teen across the world can prove, writing dark, angry poems and song lyrics is an incredibly simple thing; everyone has some absence in their soul, real or imagined, that they can draw upon for angsting and whining. Lending gothic verses like those described above poetic artistry is more difficult, but still entirely doable, and such works have become a major watershed industry for international music in the form of black metal. American music was similarly dominated by nu-metal music like Linkin Park, Korn, and Prodigy during the bleak years of post-grunge.
Steven Wilson has admitted candidly that In Absentia was largely inspired by his then contemporary work with metal bands like Opeth, but the album itself exists far outside the bleak house of black and nu-metal. While the album does concern itself with so-called “soul cancer”, hardly a cheery topic, the album also offers up “Collapse The Light”, which seems to be Wilson’s refusal of any bleak reading of the album. It’s a song that acknowledges those black holes Wilson is so obsessed with, yes, but it does so in order to dismiss their power (“I won't shiver in the cold/I won't let the shadows take their toll/I won't cover my head in the dark/And I won't forget you when we part”). It’s a song that admits weaknesses in one breath (“I won't heal given time/I won't try to change your mind/I won't feel better in the cold light of day”) and follows it with a statement of hope (“But I wouldn't stop you if you wanted to stay”).
The title and chorus of “Collapse The Light Into Earth” reveals Wilson as an optimist and humanist. If the rest of In Absentia is about mapping out the black holes and abscesses within the human spirit, “Collapse The Light” is about using that knowledge to heal and move forward. Even if one’s spirit is fundamentally broken by any one of the thousands of ailments that can take control of the mind and heart, it isn’t reason enough to end one’s life. For Wilson, illnesses are little more than a reason to heal and survive. It’s that message that allows In Absentia to transcend the serial killer pornography from popular culture and bleak house metal, and the album’s grounding in emotion and pathos elevates it above their progressive history. The technically intricate musicianship of the album is certainly impressive, but Wilson’s ability to ground it in fundamental humanity is what makes the album both important and worth revisiting.
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