Porcupine Tree: Signify (1996)

Porcupine Tree basically started more or less as a joke project by Steven Wilson. He planned on No-Man to be the band people would take seriously. Porcupine Tree started off with three privately issued cassettes, Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm (1989), Love, Death & Mussolini EP (1990), and The Nostalgia Factory (1991), all this was done almost entirely by Steven Wilson. In ’91, a new record label called Delerium showed interest in Wilson’s material, and wanted to released Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm and The Nostalgia Factory as two double LP sets, but Steven Wilson did not feel there was enough good material to warrant such a thing, so he picked the cream of the crop, re-record “Radioactive Toy”, and released it as On the Sunday Of Life…, which was their first proper album release. I realize there are lots of people who don’t think it’s a particularly good album, and believe it is more of interest to Porcupine Tree historians, although I’m of one exception, I thought it was great! It turned out Porcupine Tree was no joke, so in 1993 comes Up the Downstair, which is the earliest material most fans warm up to (material rejected for that album ended up on the original Voyage 34 12″ single from 1992). Be aware that the most recent reissue (with digipak) of Up the Downstair has brand new drum tracks added on by current drummer Gavin Harrison (the original version used drum machines since the PT was still just Steven Wilson back in ’93). Then in the middle of recording their next album, The Sky Moves Sideways, Steven Wilson felt the need for a real band, and in comes bassist Colin Edwin and keyboardist Richard Barbieri, ex-Japan (both already made a guest on a couple of songs on their previous album), plus drummer Chris Maitland. Unsurprisingly half the album are Steven Wilson only tracks, and the other half are full-band tracks.

Now comes Signify, the 1996 followup, and their first with full band interaction, and is without a doubt their finest album while they were with Delerium. I am familiar with their most recent releases, In Absentia (2002) and Deadwing (2005), and I have to say this earlier release is quite a bit different. Steven Wilson hadn’t yet included heavy metal and modern rock elements in his band, nor had he associated himself with Mikael Åkerfeldt (of the Swedish doom metal band Opeth), giving it a stronger Pink Floyd feel (and it was that Pink Floyd comparison that started to bother Mr. Wilson, that’s why he wanted PT to move beyond that).

“Bornlivedie” starts off with the sound of some radio announcer, telling you to relax and kick back, like he was ready to play lite classical or smooth jazz, then comes some ambient experiments, before starting off with the first proper song, the title track. This is an instrumental piece, rather heavy (but without the metal influence of recent releases), and some Mellotron in the background. “The Sleep of No Dreaming” is the first vocal track, and a wonderful mellow piece, pretty much typical of PT of the time, great piece still. “Pagan” is a rather sinister ambient piece that leads us to the wonderful “Waiting Phase One”, which is a great acoustic piece, with Steven Wilson’s unmistakable voice. “Waiting Phase Two” is a great instrumental part that was tagged on. “Idiot Prayer” is an instrumental piece with a bit of a techno feel (the techno influence heard on their previous two albums have been toned down here). “Sever” is a wonderful, sinister sounding piece, with some rather creative passages. “Every Home is Wired” is another fantastic piece, with some truly wonderful vocal arrangements. “Intermediate Jesus” is another instrumental ambient piece, with clips of an American fundamentalist Christian preacher speaking about saving souls and about how the young want to “live fast and die young”, all done in a wonderful spacy backdrop. Next comes “Light Mass Prayers”. Strangely it’s not Steven Wilson or Richard Barbieri, but Chris Maitland, who usually tends to drums. Nice piece. Last cut, “Dark Matter” shows the Pink Floyd influence greatly, and near the end you hear a theme from Up the Downstair recur. As you guess, many of the proper songs often had ambient experiments tagged on, where in more recent releases, an ambient experiment might be included in the proper song (often after some heavy metal guitar riffs), and not as extended.

If you get the current CD reissue on Snapper with the digipak, you also get a bonus CD, which was originally released as a fan-club only album called Insignificance (1997), which were Signify outtakes from 1995 and ’96, some of them original versions of cuts that never made it to Signify, like “Waiting” and “Sever”, material not found anywhere else (like “Smiling Not Smiling”, “Wake as Gun I”, “Neural Rust”, etc.), plus a new version of “Nine Cats” that originally appeared on On the Sunday of Life…

People people don’t always seem to have the same opinion about Porcupine Tree. Some people feel the band didn’t become really good until Stupid Dream (1999) and after, others felt the band sold-out at that point, and stop with Signify and its companion live album, Coma Divine (1997), but I pretty much keep the band with an open mind and they all have their merit.

Regardless, Signify is a wonderful place to start if you want to dig in to their pre-Stupid Dream catalog!