Steven Wilson
The Overview
★★★★
FICTION
Two years ago, Steven Wilson curated an expansive 58-track box set compilation titled Intrigue: Progressive Sounds In UK Alternative Music 1979-89. A partial reclaiming of the ‘progressive’ term that has in some ways dogged both his solo career and his long tenure as the bandleader of (the now fallow) Porcupine Tree, his selections also served to shine a light on the maverick studio dreamers of that era who’d so inspired him. Alongside widely acknowledged sonic adventurers Kate Bush, PiL, the Associates and The The, he found room for lesser-recognised production pioneers such as Bill Nelson and Rupert Hine who’d tended to operate on the margins while pushing the envelope.
If there’s been a sense that Wilson has spent many shou years trying to dig himself out of a prog-shaped hole that he first broke ground on as a bedroom-recording teenager in Hemel Hempstead in the mid-’80s, by creating the initially one-man fantasy band Porcupine Tree, then his subsequent parallel career as a surround-sound mixer of catalogue LPs for the likes of Yes, King Crimson and Jethro Tull seemed to cement a perception of him as what Robert Fripp called the “progfather of his generation”. Some of Wilson’s past solo records tried to shake that label through diversions into post-punk (2008’s Insurgentes) and synth-pop (2021’s The Future Bites), before The Harmony Codex in 2023 managed to fuse his competing styles while stretching out into the longform.
Now, in a time when being exploratory and elaborate is once again acceptable, or even fashionable – see the Crimson-adjacent The Smile, the slow-burning arrangements of Lankum, and ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett collaborating with former Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser in Sun’s Signature – Wilson has fully and unabashedly embraced prog on his eighth solo LP. Still, he keeps the running time tight here at 42 minutes, in the form of only two, sidelong conceptual pieces.
Following his conversations with Alexander Milas of Space Rocks, an organisation that celebrates space exploration through multi-media art, Wilson originally toyed with the idea of creating music for a visual installation examining the ‘overview effect’: astronauts experiencing a profound psychological shift after returning to Earth. That notion morphed into a more traditional album format (with accompanying film) dealing with the enhanced perspectives of viewing our planet from space.
It’s a concept previously explored by Kate Bush on Hounds Of Love in The Ninth Wave, as she referenced Neil Armstrong’s moon landing epiphany (“My thumb blotted out the planet,” he marvelled) in Hello Earth. Here, Wilson nods towards author/astronomer Carl Sagan’s description of our world, appearing minuscule and vulnerable in a far distant Voyager 1-shot photograph, as a ‘Pale Blue Dot’. “The paleness and fragility/Of this I call home,” Wilson sings partway through Borrowed Atoms, encapsulating the theme of The Overview.
The first of the two song-suites, Objects Outlive Us, ushers in new collaborator Andy Partridge. A teen XTC fan and latterly reissue remixer of the band’s LPs, Wilson approached Partridge to contribute a lyric – for what became Objects: Meanwhile – juxtaposing images of everyday human activity with faraway cosmic events. Amid a swirl of acoustic guitars, piano and modular synth over a rolling 12/8 groove, Partridge employs perhaps oversimple rhymes but conjures up reliably striking imagery: groceries from a woman’s broken plastic bag tumbling to the ground “like star clusters smashing” and, elsewhere, an outage at a bank caused by the fact that “a solar flare blew out the power”.
It’s a highly effective third passage in the eight-part Objects Outlive Us that moves from the falsetto-voiced electronic curtain raiser No Monkey’s Paw to the thumping Queen chorale of The Buddha Of The Modern Age and on through the acoustic guitar arpeggios and Space Oddity Mellotron strings of The Cicerones. Then, it all goes a bit knowingly prog preposterous with the Earth-departing chant of Ark and the noodling, math metal madness of Cosmic Sons Of Toil. Finally, it cools into a reprise of the opening song’s melodic motif in the stately, atmospheric No Ghost On The Moor, in which Randy McStine offers an elegant solo, sounding like David Gilmour playing with appropriately infinite sustain.
Side Two’s 18-minute title track, meanwhile, starts off sounding like Autechre and ends up sounding like Rush. Reprising her role as narrator on The Harmony Codex, Wilson’s wife Rotem appears blankly intoning universal waypoints and increasingly impossible-to-grasp distances from Earth that read like astronomical poetry (“Ring nebula/Helix nebula/The spire”), travelling further and further out there through the zettametres and yottametres.
For the bulk of Side Two’s The Overview, however, Wilson audibly underscores his belief that he “fell into the cauldron of Pink Floyd when I was a kid”. The racing synth movements of Perspective could be On The Run remixed for Warp Records, while dreamy two-parter A Beautiful Infinity I and II travels way beyond The Dark Side Of The Moon, borrowing Us And Them’s echoing vocal tricks as Wilson sails through the stars on a journey of self-realisation: “I see myself in relation to it all”. It’s no mere Floyd homage, though, and by Infinity Measured In Moments the beats have turned skippy, before Adam Holzman’s keytar-ready Moog solo overtakes proceedings.
Given that Wilson courts the audiophile community and spends as much time on his Atmos mixes as his stereo masters, only part of the picture is revealed until you hear the LP in surround (as MOJO did, thanks to the nice people at L-Acoustics in Highgate, North London). As an immersive experience, _The Overview_favours taste over flash in its mix positioning: the guitars in The Cicerones slowly creep from back to front; the synth atmospheres of Permanence envelope the listener.
Ultimately, Wilson has to be admired for boldly venturing into the prog regions where his contemporaries fear to go. By doubling down on The Overview, his status as the progfather is secure, alongside his alignment with those mixing-desk visionaries he so admired in his youth. While some of its more indulgent elements may not be to all tastes, his scale of ambition and dazzling audacity should be applauded. Plus, in an increasingly chaotic world, the idea of escaping the planet for a while via a flight of imagination is an appealing one. More than ever, it seems, space is the place.
The Overview is out 14 March via Fiction.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade
TRACKLISTING:
OBJECTS OUTLIVE US (23.17)
No Monkey’s Paw
The Buddha Of The Modern Age
Objects: Meanwhile
The Cicerones
Ark
Cosmic Sons Of Toil
No Ghost On The Moor
Heat Death Of The Universe
THE OVERVIEW (18.27)
Perspective
A Beautiful Infinity I
Borrowed Atoms
A Beautiful Infinity II
Infinity Measured In Moments
Permanence
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