PORCUPINE TREE
We Lost the Skyline
Transmission
**** 4/5

1. The Sky Moves Sideways (4:02)
2. Even Less (3:27)
3. Stars Die (4:33)
4. Waiting (3:52)
5. Normal (4:52)
6. Drown With Me (4:09)
7. Lazarus (4:29)
8. Trains (4:04)

Total Time: 32:08

In the fall of ‘07, I was the kind of messed up that you don’t see in the movies. My girlfriend moved away and then she “moved on,” into an other dude’s apartment. This was the post-crisis just on the heels of another relationship-based crisis in my family. It was just after I started writing stories and poems in my workshops about loss and grieving, about honoring the “dead” and rejecting forgetfulness as a means of healing. It was before I realized that writing can’t save you, that thinking can’t turn things into sense. That all there is, is feel.

On October 3 of 2007 I stood in the “pit” at the House of Blues in Florida, waiting for a PORCUPINE TREE show to start. The very fact alone that a prog band was in my home state, and so close to where I lived, was huge, but that it was a band I loved was even better. I knew all of that in the days and months leading up to the show. I knew I should be excited, that this was the kind of potential great time you’re supposed to look forward to and eventually look back on. I knew it but I didn’t feel it. Instead I felt the plastic keys of my laptop’s keyboard as I stared at them, their slightly raised lettering. I heard the puny sound they made as I pressed them down, like some tiny bug under a passerby’s oblivious sneaker. I saw pixels and pale electric light, and I worried about bumping into my ex, who I knew was going to the show, as well.

After a few conversations with strangers who liked all the same bands I did, after the lights dimmed and the crowd went crazy, finally the band came out and I clapped. And soon, beaming behind them was a tremendous screen with trippy visualizations and video. There was pounding bass rattling through my fingertips and swirling lights in my eyes and voices singing along to every song. There were fists punching the air and people smiling and screaming and living all around me, none of them caring whether it was raining outside or they looked stupid. They were just in the moment, breathing it and exhaling it onto me, over me.

I knew my ex was in there somewhere. She was one of the faces in the crowd, one of the pairs of hands clapping, one of the notes crammed into this human melody, this community of noise. In this, we were connected, I thought, our very last shared something, our faceless final goodbye.

“Fucking beautiful,” a huge biker leaned over to me. He was wearing a black motorcycle shirt, a leather vest and a bandanna over his braided ponytail. He must have been a whole foot taller than me, at least 20 years older. He crouched down, “I listen to this song on the road at night. Fucking beautiful…” he shook his head. And I stared at him.

I could hardly hear him through the sound between us but I saw the way in which he spoke, so affected, like everyone here. So caught up. I felt lost in the crowd and out of myself, part of a bigger wave that was breaking with the rhythm of keyboard lines and guitar riffs. This is bigger than her or me, I thought. This isn’t our experience. This is mine.

The last note of the last song pre-encore trailing off, frontman Steven Wilson waved to the crowd and said “Thanks.” The biker roared beside me, his voice low and gravelly and childlike. “No–thank you!” he yelled. “Thank. You!”

The band closed with “Halo” from their Deadwing album and everyone chanted the chorus, and so did I. Our collective noise rained down from the ceiling and we bathed in it. That was the first time in months that I felt nailed to the ground, like I wasn’t just floating in time. I was a part of something, carried away in a communal flood of emotion. And the whole drive home my skin was tingling.

I didn’t see my ex at the show. I probably never would again, I thought.

The night after, PT was to play at a record store 20 minutes away, the show that would later become their We Lost the Skyline album. I headed down there early and waited in line, staring up at the clouds and toward the store, waiting to hear the bell on its front door ding as it flew open and held its hand out to welcome us in.

That’s when I saw her. The day before I was anxious, looking around during conversations as if I were checking out the venue’s wall art or speakers or crowds, but I was actually looking for my ex, maybe to get any meeting we would have over with, and on my terms, when I was ready for it and would have some small talk line prepared, something to say that says more in the subtext than any outsider would realize. Or maybe it was because I wanted to see her, make sure she was still all right or even see her broken, proving that she still needed me. But standing outside in the sun, my guard was down. I was vulnerable. And there she was.

Our passing was quick and awkward, as if we were almost-strangers, acquaintances who never had a meaningful enough conversation to consider each other friends. We passed as two without a history, without years of knowledge of the other or intimacy or future plans of marriage. She waved at me uncomfortably, nervously smiled. Then she stood at the end of the line as I stood at the front. My surprise turned to sadness, my sadness to quiet. My quiet turned to anger. And we each waited.

Inside, warm behind tinted windows and under roofs, on a stage surrounded by 200 people, Steven Wilson rested his guitar on his knee. “Actually it’s just me,” he sheepishly acknowledged the crowd after being introduced as “PORCUPINE TREE.”

The plan was to have the whole band play, but Wilson decided to do a solo set (at times accompanied by guitarist John Wesley) after seeing the size of the stage. Before opening the doors, he wrote an impromptu setlist, many of the tracks rarely (if ever) played live. Then he started strumming.

His first chord was metallic and lonely, reverberating long through the tight lines that we made between the rows of CD racks. I couldn’t focus and instead tried to look natural as I forced metaphors: two former lovers, so close but so separated by a fog of other people’s breath and a sky of wasted time. So near to poetic. So near that it’s pathetic.

Wilson moaned. “Sometimes I/Feel like a fist,” he sang. “Sometimes I am/The color of air,” he sang.

It was just him on stage, no one else. He was on a stool. Everyone was silent and watching him, as if struck by the emotion he wasn’t afraid to show, enamored with it, humbled by it. I watched him. I looked around. Mouths were open, but it wasn’t gawking. It was a kind of fascination, the kind that comes from seeing something you know is real, something you’re intrinsically connected to but still don’t fully understand.

“Sometimes it’s only afterwards,” his eyes were closed, “I find that I’m not there.”

The set was stripped down. There were no keyboards, no drums, only strings and the sound of searching. For me, it was one of those strange mixed epiphanies that you know you’re having, and know that it’s because of your trainwreck headspace. Almost surreal, Wilson chose songs about loss, about a fading sense of earthly grounding, about craving feeling, even pain, about waiting for rebirth–and then about coming back from death, beating it, pushing your way out from a dark stone tomb, his acoustic melody joined by Wesley’s graceful electric solos painting the scene, a post-corpse whose eyes are trying to adjust to the now-brand new sunlight.

Simplified and to the point, We Lost the Skyline isn’t a “progressive” record. It’s an example of the purest kind of performance, songs bare bones and reinterpreted, just a guitar and a voice, singing behind closed eyes as if looking for something in the darkness that you know is there but somehow misplaced when you were younger.

Soak this in, I thought, standing packed in my row with all the others, silent together, clapping and yelling together, sweating from so much body heat. Then I closed my eyes.

Not unlike much of Wilson’s work, the highlights here are in the obscure tracks. “Drown with Me,” an In Absentia b-side, is given a different kind of life in his acoustic pairing with Wesley’s electric. And “Stars Die,” a b-side all the way back from The Sky Moves Sideways, is genuinely better here than its original studio rendition. It’s a track dripping with an earnest vocal quality and an incredible sense of yearning. And the album as a whole is filled with that same kind of musical tenderness, partly because of the recording and how well it captures that sense of personality that comes with playing in such a small venue, in the interactions between Wilson and the crowd, the jokes and stories and level of general intimacy.

I once heard Wilson say that to him the saddest songs were always the most beautiful. But that’s not to say his music is inherently morose. One thing it is–and this is never more evident than in We Lost the Skyline–is introspective, and sensitive, and tinged with the kind of melancholy that doesn’t ever attempt to hide behind anger or melodrama. And that’s what makes it all, especially We Lost the Skyline, better than beautiful. It makes it genuine.