Eh, I guess this is better than the first album. I’ll strive to avoid getting my hopes up too high after the debacle last time. Right away I can tell you that the much-restrained running time cuts back on the filler significantly, so I can add extra points for trimming nearly half an hour off compared with the debut’s bloated length. Other than that, when you really boil it down, Up the Downstair feels like a smaller second helping of On the Sunday of Life with a pinch of salt added for flavor. The album’s title is even yet another embarrassing slice of pothead philosophy. As far as I’m concerned Steven Wilson still hasn’t found his own voice yet and is continuing to ape his heroes. It’s fine, he’s competent enough at it in 1993 and the end product is a passable work of enjoyable music. The production is nice too, but I expect no less from Mr. Wilson’s production prowess even at this early stage. The problem truly lies in Up the Downstair‘s tepidness. It’s not a bad album, but I doubt anyone reaches for this one first as their true Porcupine Tree favorite. The record drips with robotic sterility, perhaps due to the HUGE resemblance I hear between the repetitive melodic space rock rhythms and, like, ’90s-era MIDI files for boss fights in sci-fi games. On one hand I should be all over that shit like the nerd I am, but on the other hand it makes everything sound dreadfully dated almost 15 years later. Yeah, I know, it’s unfair to judge older music through the lens of the future blah blah blah. I’m going to anyway to help fit the narrative I’ve established! My blog my rules, bitches.

Wilson considers this the first proper Porcupine Tree album since it was developed in real-time and not compiled from existing tracks like the debut. Sounds to me like a bit of clumsy retconning to me there in order to save face, Steve. Nice try. On the Sunday of Life is still your first proper Porcupine Tree album and it still gets a nice fat “Kinda Bad” final rating. Suck it. As such, while I won’t consider Up the Downstair anything other than the second goddamned Porcupine Tree album, I will certainly take note that the overall flow of the album’s continuity is nicer than the debut as a result of this real-time production and, of course, the less filler. Once you take some clean tweezers and pick it apart in a laboratory you’ll see very much so that, scientifically, this has the building blocks of a good album stacked all spick-and-span. Well done. But I can tell by now already that Wilson has an incredibly logical Type A personality, so it’s just too calculated and dull to compensate for its efficiency and well-constructed bones. Ho hum. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

The album starts off with an intro of noisy psychedelia that doesn’t build up for more than about 45 seconds before abruptly stopping for a sampled announcement: “What you are listening to are musicians performing psychedelic music under the influence of a mind-altering chemical called…” and then that gets cut off as the next song “Synesthesia” starts up. A chemical called what? A chemical called what, motherfucker?? Don’t leave me hanging like that. Anyway, “Synesthesia” is a killer true opener for the album. The same nervous electronic beat repeats throughout the whole song while Steve Wilson sings very Steve Wilsony, as he does, capped off with a couple of cool-ass acid guitar solos. There’s also a very clever lyrical concept: the verse “It’s only a number/It’s only a death/Another soldier died in action/The telegram regrets“, for example, is a dig at our puny human brain’s cognitive bias to wave off casualties as statistics instead of eliciting meaningful emotional responses. Synesthesia, though, is a phenomenon where the brain may elicit meaningful emotional responses to numbers in of themselves. OK, well, it’s clever enough, man.

Another short interlude follows that I actually never knew existed until I looked at a track list. “Monuments Burn Into Moments” is only 20 seconds long and acts as a sort of reprise of the opening track in order to close out “Synesthesia”. Next comes “Always Never”, a very laid-black Pink Floydian exercise of groove-laden art-rock that sounds a lot like what you’d hear in future Porcupine Tree albums, drenched in a heaping amount psychedelic sauce of course. From this point forward the album starts to sound like extra versions of “Synesthesia” and “Always Never”, bouncing between lengthy up-tempo trance rock numbers (“Up the Downstair” and “Burning Sky”) and mellow, introspective, melodic slow-groove rock numbers (“Not Beautiful Anymore”, “Small Fish”, and “Fadeaway”). All of these songs are successful efforts, nothing outright bad or anything like that, but it’s a little disappointing to make your way through the record and realize that the awesome ideas present earlier are rehashed later, again and again, causing diminishing returns. Thematic and instrumental diversity is also lacking. The saving grace is that “Fadeaway”, the album’s closer, has such a goddamn gorgeous melody and progression that you aren’t leaving with a sour taste in your mouth. But, hey, that’s how you want to make an album, right? Start out strong, finish strong, and never mind the blob of tepid mud in the middle.

All right, I’m being unnecessarily harsh at this point. Every true song on here has flourishes of brilliance and I won’t undermine any of it. Other notable tracks include “Not Beautiful Anymore”, which is the biggest nominee for Most Undervalued Porcupine Tree Track Ever; catchy melody, experimental electronics, beautiful guitar solo, but it’s buried in the center of this early non-representative album. “Up the Downstair” is a driving pre-Internet computer-era electronic romp that is fun enough but it goes on far too long for something that doesn’t change up much through its duration (and if I didn’t know any better, the second half of the song is just a repeat of the first half, no?). “Burning Sky” is similar with a slightly different repetitive electronic beat with guitar solos and ambient sections in slightly different spots, and it also goes on far too long. Again, early generation video games come to mind in a big way here. Perhaps Wilson missed his calling composing for Sega? He’s not funky enough, though, so the ToeJam and Earl soundtrack would’ve bummed people the fuck out.

Honestly though, the pros outweigh the cons and Up the Downstair is absolutely worth the listen, I mean it. The Pink Floyd fanboy is still Pink Floyding it up with his Pink Floyd ripoff pieces, but Floyd themselves have done much worse than this (and you’re an idiot if you disagree, I don’t care how big of a Floyd fan you might be), and Wilson’s own personality is slowly but surely seeping into his work. I’m also glad he stopped trying to be fucking funny. However, he’s attempting to fabricate the thrills on an assembly line here and I’m not buying it. The intention is good, the execution is good, but to me it comes off as a quasi-corporate product of heartless, by-the-book tunes; too cold and calculated to start a revolution and too neat and tidy to be rebellious or challenging. I don’t think ‘m out of line with these claims, and I wouldn’t expect anyone to fault me for standing by my final rating on this one.

JUST OK