Post Start : 12/12/24
Now with the elephant out of the room let's move on to something more obscure, something more subtle, an album that is more or less a collection of random recordings and has a song called “Message from a Self-Destructing Turnip”.
I first learned of Porcupine Tree while browsing Open Directories subreddit (Which I will probably talk about sometime in the future) Where someone had their full discography*(-Closure/Continuation Their 2021 Album and first in 11 years after the 2009 hiatus) and few people in the comments talked about how Porcupine Tree was a great underrated band and that Fear of a Blank Planet was a wonderful album and worth listening to. Wanting to get into some new rock music as I can only listen to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin so many times I decided, “eh what the hell” and pulled the entire discography, and put it on my Jellyfin server. I picked a random song from a random album, that song being Radioactive toy, and was immediately hooked, after listening to it on loop for a day I wanted more, so I listened to the whole album it was from, On the Sunday of Life, and had quite a few favorites, and then I kept going, bouncing around adding songs to my “Favorite (Mostly Prog) Rock” Playlist.
Out of Porcupine Trees discography this album stands out, being the most psychedelic, the most scattered, and the most different from the rest of the stuff they’ve done which makes sense for it being their 1st*(excluding the demo tapes) album, and for it being essentially one guy doing the whole thing. Vocals, guitar, bass, keyboard, drum machine and post were all done by Steven Wilson, so in a way this is a steve wilson solo album.
So what are my thoughts on the songs? Really really good, although some of them are very very weird. Jupiter Island is the best vacation ad for LSD I’ve ever heard, Radioactive Toy is 16 sentences of spoken dialogue followed by a 8 minute guitar solo. Nine Cats might just be my favorite acoustic piece of all time. Footprints Is really good and i didnt notice how good it was until my 4th album relisten. and the swallows danced above the sun is an instant favorite although I can never play it in the car with anyone due to the “...I wAnT YoU tO pUt fEliXs PEnIs oN mE” which is such an absolutely bazar thing to put at the end of the song and I love it. This long silence is an absolute jam with an absolutely unintelligible ending. While those are my favorite and the ones that went on said playlist, there are some others that I just have to talk about. The aforementioned exploding turnip song is… a thing that exists. When bored I randomly send that to one of my friends just to get a bewildered reaction. Linton Samuel Dawson is the LSD song that isn't Jupiter island and is genuinely freaky the first time you hear it, like how the hell did he get the voice processing for that ending? Space transmission is some lovecraftian speech that just hits you in the middle of the album, lasts 3 minutes and leaves you freaked out.
So why do I care so much about an obscure album from a somewhat unknown band. Mostly because it's just that, not because it's obscure but because no one has talked about it and I can come to my own conclusions. So often it feels like we are stuck in a mainstream bubble or at least some subset of the mainstream. To really explain this I need to go off the rails for a moment.
The “mainstream” doesn't really exist anymore, beyond current news and overarching trends that trickle down to your corner of the internet, but it's just that, your corner. Culture has fractured allowing for the mainstream of whatever topic you're interested in communities in communities arise and split again and again each one producing their own media. While subsections of people interested in a certain topic always existed, the rise of the internet made it possible to completely disconnect from the mainstream and only interact with your specific subsection of culture, no longer were you in the know of whatever popular trend was going on until it slipped down into your corner of the internet. This is just my take on the whole “death of the mainstream”, Maybe this is just the exact definition of being out of touch with reality. My point is that finding truly obscure things that you enjoy is a lot harder. This may require another tangent…
Each of these sub communities has their own considerations of what is obscure. For instance the average gamer in the current year may consider the game universal paper clips to be an obscure game, but for the average fan of idle games, it's a landmark game in the genre. Most music listeners don’t know anything about Pink floyd's “live at pompeii” but to psychedelic rock fans it's a notable live album and some of their best work. Even the search for obscurity has gained its own communities such as the iceberg trends on reddit and youtube, and the internet spanning lost media hunts.
Getting back from those tangents, the point I'm trying to make isnt that my taste in music is good because I like an album that no one knows about or some smug superiority about standing out. It’s that this is really the first time I’ve gone out on my own into the middle of nowhere to find something I like, not because other people say it's good, or that I should listen to it, or a personal recommendation from a friend, but because I like it enough to say it's one of my favorites standing on its own 2 feet without needing to rely on an external source saying its a good album because no one has really gone out of their wa to state their thought on it, an I know reviews probably exist out there, but for once, I don't care, I am at peace knowing that I like this album simply because I do.
A few loose ends to wrap up, yes I know I was tipped off to porcupine tree due to a reddit comment thus potentially invalidating my whole speech on listener purity but my counter argument is that they were talking about a completely different album, and it's a single reddit comment. To me this is the equivalent of sailing a ship using a sextant, going of course and still finding a plentiful island, you were navigating but you did it so wrong you might as well have not been, and if you are still convinced that this ruins my speech i learned about wild light by 65daysofstatic which I will probably talk about in the future, and which this argument could also be applied to if not better than this example. And if you're still convinced that I picked this album because of its obscurity I could have just talked about Tarquin’s Seaweed farm or The Nostalgia factory, have a much more obscure album (technically ep) and have had at least half of the same songs.
And finally a call to action, go find something weird and obscure that you like not because anyone else likes it but because you do.
Post End 12/24/28