Fear of a Blank Planet

Fear of a Blank Planet is a prog rock album by Porcupine Tree. It's sometimes over- dramatic and complex. An album on which every note is scripted and the gut feelings are tucked away.

In my opinion prog is a juggernaut of a genre right now and I think a lot has to do with the fallout of this album. Where the genre used to be Yes-clones and Queensryche wannabees you've got things like Vola and Riverside, which just butterfly my crumpet. Amazing album, truly a thing of beauty!

Really nice prog rock album that sounds classic even though it is 21st century. Loved the title and concept. Great recommendation!

I really liked this one and will definitely be checking more of them out.

Rating: 7/10 Best songs: Fear of a blanket planet, Anesthesize

7/10 pretty enjoyable, but not totally my thing I’m all for art rock, but just can’t really get into metal so a bit of a mixed bag, but I’d say I liked it :)

Porcupine Tree was one of the modern juggernauts of prog-rock. Subtle musicianship, incredibly detailed compositions, atmosphere that leans melancholic and dark. This album is inspired by Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park, telling the story of a kid overwhelmed by mass media and technology. Many lyrics are borrowed directly from the book. In 2007, I thought this was superb. Then I lost interest. Not in this album specifically, but in prog-rock generally. Too much of it is fret-wanking without emotion, just musicians showing off. Revisiting this now, it's stood the test of time. The darkness and bleakness work. The theme feels even more relevant in 2025. Steven Wilson isn't the flashiest guitarist, but the drummer (Gavin Harrison) is exceptional, and the atmosphere is what makes it work. A strong album. Personally a 4-star experience, but objectively? This is an essential album for the style. Absolutely belongs on a 1001 albums list.

Never heard this band or album before. It was pretty good. My initial thoughts were this was like a darker hard rock Radiohead. The 20 minute song is quintessential prof rock though and was really like 3 songs. Overall it was enjoyable and I’d listen to it again. The dark rock tones paired well with the singers style and instrumentals. 7.0/10

Given the text on the Wikipedia page, I was expecting something much more experimental and/or progressive. It ends up being relatively standard. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

One likes the driving, intense tempos and edgy focus. Got a little Foals in it. But then too many metal tropes keep creeping back in, way dumbing down the overall experience. So just okay overall. “My Ashes” is strong, well-balanced, thoughtfully executed. It’s all too long, too (occupational hazard with prog, one suposes). Can’t in good faith recommend this for inclusion on list proper, save for replacing any outright metal records (and maybe ELP, too).

Not my type of prog, but some good moments sprinkled in

I prefer his previous stuff

Fear of a Blank Planet lasted a bit too long but I didn't mind it, a metal type of prog, it's atmospheric and heavy and I like it, but it feels too mechanical and methodical which I know sounds counter-intuitive but it doesn't breathe enough to become unpredicable. Still, 3, I liked listening to it.

More gloomy Joes. I mean, I'm pretty much on their side ideologically but the lyrical tone is so uniformly dour and humorless, and with a generous pinch of that holier-than-thou vibe that prevails in this particular marketplace of ideas - strong "I don't even OWN a teevee" vibe. Musically I didn't mind its kind of techno-Bolero, though it needed more variety.

This has loud guitars in it sometimes

Grading on the curve of Steven Wilson works, I liked his solo album on here better. Grading on the curve of “keeping the torch of prog rock lit during the 21st century,” I like Mars Volta better

Decently decent

Many people like porcupine tree

Steven Wilson’s brand of prog rock often feels like not much more than ethereal metal to me, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. His albums tend to feel cold and clinical, or maybe overly processed and lacking spontaneity. For whatever reason, it just doesn’t move me.

Enjoyable.

Prock

Estilo un poco difícil de clasificar, mezcla de pop y de algo de rock alternativo, cercano con ritmos un tanto oscuros. No me ha aportado nada especial y le noto carente de algo más que me gustase

No memory of this

Progressive rock, art rock, alternative rock. Me ha aburrido. Un 2.

Darker, droning, not very interesting

What if Tool sucked (even more)?

Waxes too much between harder, metal textures and airy ambience to find its stride – just felt too scattered between the two extremes, rather than a powerful mix of the two. Reminds me of the that one Deafheaven album where they tried actual lyrics rather than screaming, and not in a good way.

Never got why prog fans fawn so much over Porcupine Tree. Their music isn't inherently bad, but it's so standardized you're losing almost all the quirks and idiosyncracies that made legendary seventies prog rock acts what they were. For a more modern rendition of those quirks and idiosyncrasies, go to The Mars Volta instead, as some other reviewer suggested. Everything after this introduction might sound extraneous, and I wouldn't blame you for skipping to the next review. That said, I feel the need to express in more details why Porcupine Tree's oeuvre -- here represented by this 2007 record -- sounds so overrated to my ears. First of all, *Fear Of A Blank Planet* comes off as quite an ironic title, in hindsight. As said earlier, the music is not necessarily horrible, and lots of efforts and skills have been harnessed to create it. But the problem is that those efforts don't necessarily pay off as they should. Some flaws are especially obvious for me, and here's a little list of them... The vocal performance in the record is rather bland. The lyrics are pontificating. The drums sound is uninteresting. The metal-inspired parts are often heavy-handed -- when they don't simply take a page out of the "Tool for Beginners" handbook (hate or like Tool, I think their rhythmically adventurous sort of artistry can be appreciated better in its original version). Worse, the general mood is dour, Porcupine Tree rarely finding ways to generate clear-cut dynamics or genuinely intense peaks... What you have instead is meat-and-potatoes prog clichés, pulled off through overblown and streamlined production values that can even recall the worst Muse albums sometimes... Also, Steven Wilson is a reactionary twat, at least on a purely artistic viewpoint. Here's what he told in an interview in 2016: "I think it’s possible to take a step back and be objective and say that the music of today really isn’t as good as it was." Yeah, right, you're being awfully "objective" here, man. OK Boomer? That's a pretty lame take if I have ever seen one. Tell me you're out of touch with the modern music world without telling me you're out of touch, Stevie. Finally, to go beyond the subject of music itself -- in an admittedly off-topic fashion --, you don't hear Wilson tell the press Israel is such a great country these days, which he has done at least once or twice in the past. Look, I understand... Huge parts of both his professional and personal lives are rooted in Tel Aviv, and the ties he has in that part of the world made the BDS movement sound appalling to him in 2016. But the sad truth is that, stuck in his own liberal echo chamber there, he never realized -- or *refused* to fully realize -- that the country he loved so much was also run as an imperialist power crushing Palestine in whatever way it could -- therefore fueling the most fanatical elements in the latter, to the detriment of civilian populations living on both sides of the ever-changing borders. For that imperialist power, the agenda has always been pretty obvious: anything to torpedo the peace protest and refuse to be accountable for the damage that had already been done. Yeah, sure, maybe Wilson was too naive to see that the state of Israel could morph into the criminal fascistic monstrosity that it is today, and I guess you can't ask a musician to be a geopolitical expert. But even if I can't blame a whole population for the decades of mistakes their leaders have accomplished, the writing has always been on the proverbial wall for anyone with sufficient knowledge and a shred of sense left in their brains. BDS was right all along. The current death toll, along with the volatile situation for every population living in the area, simply proves it for me. So yeah, Mr. Wilson, I think I can see why you prefer to keep quiet about those sorts of international politics issues ten years later. You might have expressed all sorts of grand ideas through your lyrics in the past, you know there are some other can of worms that should never have been opened elsewhere. Or at least you do now, considering how silent you suddenly are about what has been going in the last two years. There was one initial statement from you -- a statement understandably horrified by the Oct. 7 tragedy and terror attacks, but never nominally addressing the injustice that had *also* fallen on Palestinian civilians for decades -- an injustice which would only amplify tenfold in the two years to come. And since that statement, zilch, nothing, nada. Honestly, for me, it's pretty weak, especially in the face of the thousands and thousands of deaths in the Gaza Strip. Or that silence is possibly even worse that that... But as I said, maybe it's better to keep quiet than utter yet another stupid take about things you are ill-equipped to fully understand in the first place. Just so everyone knows, the last point I've made up there didn't influence my 2/5 grade (7/10 for general purposes not related to the requirements of this list of essential albums -- 5+2). I only gave my subjective assessment of the music with this mark. But I wanted to address that *other*, far more important issue as well through this tentative "review". Thanks for listening to me, I can get down from my soapbox now. ---- Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 67 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 86 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 164 (including this one) ---- Emile... Je viens de lire ta dernière réponse. Je vais essayer de trouver le temps de rédiger la mienne bientôt. D'ici-là, ben bonne année!