Artist: Wilson, Steven
Label: K-Scope Records
Release: 2011
Length: 83:02
Rating: 5/5
In recent years Steven Wilson has become one of the most prominent names in the little sea of genres he works across, and he’s best known as the frontman of modern prog outfit Porcupine Tree. The Brits were one of the few prog-rock-minted bands to break through the wall of “autotuned” teenage starlets and generic electronically built beats, and they woke the hope of music junkies for an active, popular (progressive) scene where quality is a given, which had been asleep for some 30 years. But presenting Steven Wilson only through Porcupine Tree is a massive underestimation – the brilliant self-taught guitarist and engineer inevitably goes beyond any narrow equation with Porcupine Tree. With his countless projects he shows immense know-how through guitar, vocals, or by manipulating sound, mastering and mixing, because he never, ever stays within the bounds of that retro seventies sound, but pulls influences from drone, post-punk, psychedelia, the harsher strains of metal, shoegaze, and of course jazz and, finally, even pop. His projects back this up – Porcupine Tree with its modern take on progressive rock, Blackfield with a melancholic pop tinge and three-minute “hits”, No-Man edging closer to Wilson’s psychedelic and cosmic idea of music, Bass Communion soaked in heavy bass and the repetition of a single distorted, smeared tone, which is the whole point of drone sounds, while some of the other projects also show Wilson’s fondness for bands like The Cure and My Bloody Valentine (in his cover projects Wilson reinterprets “A Forest” by post-punkers The Cure, and shoegaze plays a big part on Steve’s debut “Insurgentes”). Indirectly, as a self-taught producer, Wilson’s name turns up on even more albums than in his primary projects, since in recent years he’s been one of the most in-demand sound manipulators in the waters of the prog scene. That’s exactly why only a solo album lets us fully get to know his genius, with entirely his own influences, his own production, his own feelings and (musical) desires.
That’s exactly what Steven Wilson himself has been saying in recent interviews when asked how he sees his second solo album “Grace for Drowning”. The first one, “Insurgentes”, enjoyed relative success with prog fans as well as other music newcomers, since the album itself has far fewer progressive rock influences than you’d expect. Wilson says he was mostly under the spell of shoegaze and post-punk at the time, which is easy to hear in the ambient look of the songs on the album. In interviews he says the same about “Grace for Drowning” – since he’s been sonically reworking the discography of one of the greatest progressive rock groups, King Crimson, it seemed only logical to him to draw a lot of inspiration for his new album from them (Wilson has always been compared to Fripp anyway, mostly because of unusual chords and solos built on a kind of anti-melody and dissonance), while at the same time, as mentioned, he talks about finally being unlimited in wishes and ideas on a solo project, since in many of his bands the writing of songs is a harmony and symbiosis of the members (Wilson hints that someone in Porcupine Tree doesn’t like jazz, in Blackfield Aviv is nuts about three-minute pop structures, and so on); and at the same time, over the course of his career he’s become famous enough that he can easily track down exactly the right musician for exactly the right song or instrument, which showed the Brit to be a great leader and all-round conductor – which is what he was on “Grace for Drowning” first, and a musician only after that.
“Grace for Drowning”, which involves more than 10 musicians, is split into two parts – “Deform to Form a Star” and “Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye” – and the bonus disc that comes only with the Deluxe edition holds a third part, called “The Map” (with demo recordings and tracks Wilson cut from the concept of the first two parts). The first thing you notice after the first listen is definitely a certain inconsistency, a strangely oscillating rise and fall of tension and darkness, an apparently clumsy dance between distorted atonality and gorgeous melancholic harmonies, and the end result sounds kind of fragmented and makes the listener feel distinctly psychophysically uneasy. The transitions between songs confuse us, knock us off the rails and shake us out of our listening mood; at least that’s how it seems at first glance. If we dig deeper, it’s precisely this approach that brilliantly camouflages the extremely thin red thread Steven Wilson sews through our ears while constantly poking our eardrum with a needle, the one that works so powerfully on our unconscious, non-cognitive side, that finds emotions and moods we were convinced weren’t there and sends them along neurological pathways to our extremities – namely, once we finally accept that this is no ordinary album and so demands an unusual listener, only then do we start to enjoy all of Wilson’s genius. At the same time, such an approach is completely personal, Steven’s own, and points to what I wrote about earlier – the musician’s personal swinging between genres, preferences, musical phases and current influences. King Crimson is one such influence, most obvious on the incredible instrumental “Sectarian”, an extremely modern interpretation of the seventies Crimson, who were ahead of their time even then. “Frippian” guitar riffs and passages, the creation of an unsurpassable peak with organ, and Elton Dean’s (saxophonist of the legendary Canterbury band Soft Machine) successor Theo Travis with a dark, in places free-jazz-leaning soprano saxophone are the basic formula for reaching the ambient-schizophrenic landscapes of the eclectic King Crimson world. Before “Sectarian”, though, “Deform to Form a Star” leads us in with a two-minute title track, atmospherically gorgeous and melancholically pop-minded, a duet between Rudess on piano and Wilson with a pop-song “lalala” at the mic. So, as opposed to “Sectarian”, on “Grace for Drowning” we get the basic formula for a radio ditty, but the result is something completely different, something with a thoroughly unique role, which even on its own comes off as eerie, tense, like a herald of an approaching apocalyptic storm. Seriously – Wilson doesn’t joke around even on the pop-song tracks. Or play a major chord.
Sometimes it feels like Wilson is, to put it mildly, playing with us. Not that cat-and-mouse kind of game, more like he’s testing whether the listener will sit through the whole game and join in, only to smile sincerely at the end and slap their hand. Because if “Grace for Drowning” was the calm before the apocalyptic storm in a pop-song mask, then “Deform to Form a Star” is another Wilson masquerade, at least stylistically. This time he takes all the familiar progressive forms of a musical whole, irregular rhythms, out-of-time breaks, epic length, “King Crimson-style” moves (not least, Tony Levin plays bass guitar on the track) and makes a pop song. With Travis’s free-jazz clarinet, a prog-metal guitar riff and solo, and drone noises of experimental proportions. When was the last time you could whistle an experimental progressive rock track?
So the genre synesthesia seems to have no end in sight. Though to a lesser degree, the influences mentioned above keep cropping up in the following tracks of the first part – post-punk on the fifth track “Postcard”, say, then dark Gregorian arias in “Raider Prelude”, the intro to the good 23-minute “Raider”, which is the second-to-last track of the second part, and so on. Also worth mentioning is “Remainder the Black Dog”, the first promo track, released before “Grace for Drowning” came out, yet another unique product of a heap of genres, unusual transitions between individual instruments (with Nick Beggs on Chapman stick leading the way) and a guitar solo from Genesis guitar hero Steve Hackett.
“Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye” starts off in a different style from the first part – this time the schizophrenia flows primarily through the ink of Wilson’s lyrical pen, not through the sonic curtains of guitar effects and (anti)melodies (though the latter don’t lag far behind this time either) and general musical cacophonies. “Index” is the story of a serial killer with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a collector of people and their pasts, a motif that isn’t appearing in Wilson’s music for the first time. He says himself that he’s obsessed with them and devours books of stories and profiles about them. Instrumentally he backs his lyrics with all sorts of post-rock patterns, which in the genre tracks in question sort of pile onto the instrumental – weird noises, indefinable sounds and similar bits and pieces, made with a matrix, that otherwise live outside any musical context. The title track of the second part is followed by “Track One”, but “Raider II” is the track, not a track, a whole odyssey through the Delphic “Know thyself”, through the cobwebs of the human mind, which is perhaps the essence not only of the second part but of the whole of “Grace for Drowning” – it sums up the entire record, and with it all of Wilson’s work and the aim of his desire to influence the psychophysics of the unconscious side of the human right brain and the cognitive left half (whether that’s actually his aim is of course another question, but we can’t help getting lost in the magic of the numbers in the construction of Wilson’s tracks). This time too we have the serial killer motif, so the schizophrenic quality of the music, which Wilson defines so phenomenally, even personifies and gives such an adjective, is at least partly guaranteed, and it also justifies all the inconsistency and swinging present on the album. This time, rather than on the acts that make the serial killer what he is, he focuses on his “why” behind those acts and tries to present his consciousness instrumentally – he mostly pulls this off unsurpassably, with his drone music influence, which also helps with the epic scale of the track. This is backed up by the fact that while making the second part of the album Wilson was also preparing the new Bass Communion album “Cenotaph”, but that’s more than coincidence, since through drone music Wilson can more easily explore and convincingly portray the inner labyrinth of countless neurological spiderwebs, self-contained, independent and cut off from the reality that lives in the shattered mind of a serial killer. Consequently the track looks exactly like that – in ruins, not confused but deliberately severed from the real perception of space and time that belong to music, with no obvious beginning or end, chaotic order, ordered chaos, whatever you like. That’s exactly why “Raider II” has such a powerful effect on the listener. It was created directly as a sonic model of the brain, a kind of vocal mirror of the mind, as if Wilson looked at an X-ray of a brain, saw notes and played them, creating a direct link between mind and music right from the very start. And that link between mind and music never falls apart, never snaps, which the listener feels too, and what’s more, through the music, which acts as a medium, they connect with the mind of the serial killer themselves. And they never expect that a glimpse into such a dark and empathic mind could bring such ecstasy.
The album ends with the title track of the second part, “Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye”. Wilson steps out of the schizophrenic psychedelia of a disintegrating and destructive mind and returns to the world of ordinary mortals, though he doesn’t step onto “real” ground, but sort of hovers above it, with ethereal vocals and a gentle organ sound, slow, pulsing drums and, for once, a guitar melody that doesn’t sound dark, just beautifully sad and melancholic, “Blackfield-style”. If you happen to get the Deluxe version of the album, you can stretch the ecstasy out a bit longer, because besides the three tracks that fell out of the album’s concept, you also get three demo recordings, three “pre-mixes”, ideas (pre-Raider, pre-Raider II and pre-Remainder The Black Dog) that give you one more glimpse into Wilson’s mind and his process of making music. The first three tracks certainly continue the quality of the first two parts of the main album, and the sketches of two of the best songs sound even more raw and closer to the real Wilson, since they were made before the production that makes the songs sound more progressive rock, still unique to Wilson, but showing that his love lies less in prog than in drone, post-punk and similar genres, and only the fusion of all of them brings prog rock as Steven Wilson understands it and always has in mind.
“Grace for Drowning” isn’t a progressive rock album. “Grace for Drowning” isn’t even a music album per se. “Grace for Drowning” is simply art. The art of sounds, letters and, finally, images. And if the Greeks worshipped artists like gods and Eric Clapton were (supposedly) a god, he’d be Poseidon; because Zeus is Steven Wilson.
Lineup
Steven Wilson – piano, electric guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, percussion
Jordan Rudess – piano
Steve Hackett – electric guitar
Sand Snowman – acoustic guitar
Tony Levin – bass guitar, stick bass
Trey Gunn – bass guitar, Warr guitar
Nick Beggs – bass guitar, stick bass
Markus Reuter – U8 guitar
Nic France – drums
Pat Mastelotto – drums
Theo Travis – saxophone, clarinet, flute
Ben Castle – clarinet
London Session Orchestra – strings
Dave Stewart – strings
Production
Steven Wilson
Track list
Disc 1: Deform to Form a Star
1. “Grace for Drowning” 2:06
2. “Sectarian” 7:41
3. “Deform to Form a Star” 7:51
4. “No Part of Me” 5:45
5. “Postcard” 4:29
6. “Raider Prelude” 2:23
7. “Remainder the Black Dog” 9:27
Disc 2: Like Dust I Have Cleared from My Eye
1. “Belle de Jour” 2:59
2. “Index” 4:49
3. “Track One” 4:16
4. “Raider II” 23:21
5. “Like Dust I Have Cleared from My Eye” 8:01
Disc 3: The Map (Deluxe Edition)
1. “Home in Negative” 3:00
2. “Fluid Tap” 5:45
3. “The Map” 3:30
4. “Raider Acceleration” 6:15
5. “Black Dog Throwbacks” 2:30
6. “Raider II (Demo Version)” 21:15
