Flint Journal has issued the following report from Doug Pullen:

Steven Wilson of the British progressive rock group PORCUPINE TREE was lying on a beach in Jamaica reading Bret Easton Ellis' semi-autobiographical Lunar Park last year when all the thoughts spinning in his head about music, young people and technology-fed isolation began to coalesce.

The result is Fear Of A Blank Planet, one of my favorite CDs this year. It's a throwback to the prog-rock era of the 1970s, a concept album that explores those themes, lights on musical touchstones such as KING CRIMSON and RUSH (whose Robert Fripp and Alex Lifeson, respectively, make guest appearances) and makes a strong statement about the album as art form.

Interestingly, the band that started as something of a joke is celebrating its 20th anniversary, quietly amassing an impressive, if overlooked, body of work.

The new album's title "is a joke," admits Wilson, who leads Porcupine Tree into Detroit's Majestic Theatre for a concert at 8 PM Wednesday, "but it's also a perfect summing up of my feelings about life in the 21st century, how we live, so many of us, vicariously through our technology and what effect in the long term it's gonna have."

Like all good prog-rock concept albums, Fear Of A Blank Planet has an ominous doom-and-gloom theme and a close-u of a child's empty gaze, bathed in the foreboding blue glow of a TV screen. Wilson said it was inspired by Robby, the 11-year-old child in Lunar Park" who secludes himself in his bedroom, sedated by psychotropic drugs and "hypnotized" by his PlayStation, TV, cellphone and his iPod.

Wilson, 39, grew up listening to bands like King Crimson and Rush. He misses the days when an album was a cohesive "work of art," with a gatefold cover that provided a tactile experience to go along with an aural one. He said that's being lost in the age of digital downloads and mp3 players.

Like most of us, he struggles with today's high-tech attention deficit disorder.

"When I was a teenager I used to devour books daily. I'd start one in the morning and finish it the same day. But now I start one, I read a couple of pages and I have to check my e-mail," Wilson complained. "I get distracted by something, I'm texting on my cell, updating my iPod and I never come back to the book until four months later and I have to start it again. The only time I read is on vacation."

Like the one in Jamaica.

Wilson worries that in an age of pervasive yet disposable music and culture (he loathes shows like American Idol and Cribs) that we are not considering the consequences of all the technology we have at our fingertips.

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