BY ENRICO SPINELLI
It is always difficult to talk about progressive, because first of all, it is not even a genre, it has no defined characteristics or rules to follow, let's say that it is more a label... and Steven Wilson knows it well, who both with Porcupine Tree and as a soloist has always sought all possible solutions at the service of art.
So here is the longed-for return, 13 years after the controversial "The incident" (not exactly the most memorable), a return that does not benefit from a beautiful cover, at least for me, and that plays on the ambiguity of the title for messing up the cards. 48 minutes of music, with the usual excellent production by Wilson himself, clean but not cold. And let's get to the songs, because here, in these 7 tracks, we find plenty of quality! The dreamy opener "Harridan" would already be enough to demonstrate the comeback of Porcupine Tree in grand style, mitigated by the melancholic ballad "Of The New Day" and then displacing us with the horror "Rats Return". "Dignity" is rightly among the songs of 2022, while "Herd Culling" proves to be particularly direct and violent despite the changes in tempo. The next "Walk The Plank" is closer to certain solutions a-la Depeche Mode.
The long "Chimera's Wreck" closes the dances by pulling the strings, as a compendium of everything we have heard in the previous 40 minutes. an impeccable sound, an album that wants to be heard and listened again not to be appreciated, because at least I liked it immediately, but to fully grasp the various nuances.