Porcupine Tree - Stars Die - rare & unreleased (1999)

By 1999 Porcupine Tree were a well-established band in the UK, and were rightly regarded as one of the best progressive rock bands around, but in an attempt to get them appreciated in Europe a cassette tape was issued in Poland containing a variety of rare and unreleased recordings. Three years later the tape was raided for an official compilation from their record label, taking both the artwork and the title, expanding it slightly to 'Stars Die: The Delerium Years 1991-1997', but only using a few of the tracks, and so the cassette version does still contain quite a lot of hard to find pieces from the band. The tape was a mixture of rare singles and b-sides on side A, with the flip being tracks from the 'Signify' recordings sessions, which had been released in their own right as the 'Insignificance' cassette in 1997. Some of the tracks on 'Stars Die' are in fact unique to the tape, with 'Wake As Gun II' in particular being nearly two minutes longer than the version on the 'Signify' re-issue, and it also includes a cover of Neu!'s Hallogallo segued into their own 'Signify', a live recording of 'Up The Downstair' from Rome, and an acoustic take of 'Nine Cats'. Although a lot of the the tracks have since surfaced elsewhere, this album is still worth having both as sampler of the band's output up to 1999, but also as the intriguing curio of a Poland-only cassette tape release. 

Track listing

01 Stars Die
02 The Sound Of No-one Listening
03 Colourflow In Mind
04 Fuse The Sky
05 Up The Downstair
06 Wake As Gun I
07 Hallogallo / Signify
08 Smiling Not Smiling
09 Wake As Gun II
10 Door To The River
11 Insignificance
12 Nine Cats