Label: K-Scope Records
Release year: 2011
Production: Steven Wilson
Album length: 83.03
Genre: Progressive Rock / Art Rock
In recent years Steven Wilson has emerged as one of the most prominent names in the small sea of genres he works across, and he’s best known as the frontman of modern prog darlings Porcupine Tree. The Brits were one of the few progressive rock bands to break through the wall of autotuned teen starlets and generic electronically built beats, and they woke up the hope of music junkies for an active, popular (progressive) music scene where quality is a given, a hope that had been asleep for some 30 years. But introducing Steven Wilson only through Porcupine Tree seriously undersells him – the self-taught genius of guitar and engineering necessarily goes beyond any narrow-minded equation with Porcupine Tree. With his countless projects he shows immense skill through guitar, vocals, or by manipulating sound, mastering and mixing, because he never, ever stays within the confines of that retro seventies sound, but pulls in influences from drone, post-punk, psychedelia, heavier strains of metal, shoegaze, and of course jazz and even, ultimately, pop. His projects back this up: Porcupine Tree with a modern interpretation of progressive rock, Blackfield with a melancholic pop touch and three-minute “hits”, No-Man closer to Wilson’s psychedelic and cosmic idea of music, Bass Communion saturated with heavy bass and the repetition of a single distorted, smeared tone, which is the whole point of drone sounds, and a few 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 role on Steve’s debut “Insurgentes”). Indirectly, as a self-taught producer, Wilson’s name turns up on even more albums than his primary projects, since in recent years he’s been one of the most in-demand sound manipulators in the waters of the progressive scene. That’s exactly why it’s only a solo album that 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 said in recent interviews when he was asked how he sees his second solo album, “Grace for Drowning”. The first one, “Insurgentes”, saw relative success among prog fans as well as other music enthusiasts, since the album itself has far fewer progressive rock influences than you’d expect. Wilson claims that at the time he was mostly under the influence of shoegaze and post-punk, which is easy to hear through the ambient look of the songs on the album. In interviews he says the same about “Grace for Drowning” – since he’s recently been sonically reworking the discography of one of the greatest progressive rock groups, King Crimson, it seems logical to him that he took a lot of inspiration for his new album right from them (Wilson has always been compared to Fripp anyway, mainly because of the unusual chords and solos built on a kind of anti-melody and dissonance). At the same time, as mentioned, he talks about finally being unrestricted with a solo project when it comes to wishes and ideas, since in many of his bands writing songs is a matter of harmony and symbiosis between the members (Wilson hints that someone in Porcupine Tree doesn’t like jazz, and in Blackfield Aviv is nuts about three-minute pop structures, etc.). And he’s already become so renowned over the years that he can easily find exactly the right musician for exactly the right song or instrument, which revealed the Brit as a great leader and all-around conductor, something that came first on “Grace for Drowning” and only then the musician.
“Grace for Drowning”, which features more than 10 musicians, is split into two parts – “Deform to Form a Star” and “Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye”, while the bonus disc, included only with the Deluxe edition, contains a third part called “The Map” (with demo recordings and tracks that 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 a final effect where everything sounds somehow apart and leaves the listener distinctly psychophysically uneasy. The transitions between songs confuse us, throw us off track and knock us out of our listening mood; at least that’s how it seems at first glance. Dig deeper and it’s exactly this approach that brilliantly masks the extremely thin red thread Steven Wilson sews through our ears, constantly poking our eardrums with a needle. It works so powerfully on our unconscious, non-cognitive side, finds emotions and moods we were convinced didn’t exist and sends them along neurological pathways to our extremities – namely, once we finally accept that this isn’t an ordinary album and therefore demands an unusual listener, only then do we start enjoying all of Wilson’s genius. At the same time this approach is entirely 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 visible on the incredible instrumental “Sectarian”, a super-modern interpretation of the seventies Crimson, who were way ahead of their time already. “Frippian” guitar riffs and passages, the creation of an unsurpassed climax with organ, and Elton Dean’s (saxophonist of the legendary Canterbury band Soft Machine) successor Theo Travis on a dark and 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”, “Deform to Form a Star” takes us through the two-minute title track, atmospherically gorgeous and melancholically pop-minded, a duet between Rudess on piano and Wilson with some crooner-style “lalala-ing” at the mic. So, as the opposite of “Sectarian”, “Grace for Drowning” has the basic formula for a radio ditty, but the result is something completely different, something with a totally unique role that comes off creepy and tense in its own right, like a forecast of an approaching apocalyptic storm. Seriously – Wilson doesn’t joke around even on the pop-song tracks. Or plays a major chord.
Sometimes it feels like Wilson, to put it mildly, is playing with us. And not that cat-and-mouse kind of game, more like he’s testing whether the listener will catch on to the whole thing and join in, and in the end honestly smile and high-five him. Because if “Grace for Drowning” was the calm before an apocalyptic storm wearing 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, odd rhythms, off-the-clock breaks, epic length, “King Crimson-esque” moves (Tony Levin plays bass on the track, after all) and makes a pop song out of it. 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?
Genre synesthesia, then, shows no end in sight. Though to a lesser degree, the influences mentioned above keep turning up in the remaining songs of the first part – post-punk, for instance, in the fifth track “Postcard”, then dark Gregorian arias in “Raider Prelude”, the intro to a good 23-minute-long track “Raider”, which is the second-to-last song on the second part of the album, 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 blend of a heap of genres, unusual interplay between individual instruments (led by Nick Beggs on Chapman Stick bass) and a guitar solo by Genesis guitar hero Steve Hackett.
“Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye” starts in a different style from the first part – this time the schizophrenia runs primarily through the ink of Wilson’s lyrical pen, not through sonic curtains of guitar effects and (anti-)melodies (although 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 doesn’t appear in Wilson’s music for the first time. He himself says he’s obsessed with such people and devours books of stories and profiles about them. Instrumentally he backs up his lyrics with all sorts of post-rock patterns that, in those genre tracks, kind of pile up into an instrumental – strange 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 along the Delphic “Know thyself”, through the cobwebs of the human mind, which is perhaps the essence not just of the second part but of all of “Grace for Drowning” – it sums up the whole record, and with it Wilson’s whole body of work and the aim of his desire to affect the psychophysics of the unconscious right half of the human brain and the cognitive left half (whether that’s really his aim is of course an open 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 so phenomenally defines, even personifies and gives such an adjective, is at least partly guaranteed, and it also justifies all that inconsistency and oscillation present on the album. This time, rather than the acts that make the serial killer what he is, he focuses on the “why” behind those acts and tries to present his consciousness instrumentally – he mostly pulls it 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 a coincidence, since through drone music Wilson can more easily explore and convincingly portray the inner labyrinth of countless neurological spiderwebs, self-contained, independent and detached from reality, that dwell in the shattered mind of a serial killer. Consequently the track looks just like that – in ruins, not confused, but deliberately cut off from the real perception of space and time that belong to music, with no obvious beginning or end, chaotic order, ordered chaos, whatever you prefer. That’s exactly why “Raider II” has such a strong 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 saw notes in an X-ray of the brain and played them, creating a direct link between mind and music right from the 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 acting as a medium, connects with the mind of the serial killer. And never expects that insight into such a dark and empathic mind could bring such ecstasy.
The album ends with the second part’s title track, “Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye”. Wilson steps out of the schizophrenic psychedelia of a decaying, destroying 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 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 a further glimpse into Wilson’s mind and his process of making music. The first three tracks certainly keep up the quality of the first two parts of the main album, and the sketches of two of the best songs sound even more primal and closer to the real Wilson, since they were created before the production that makes the songs sound more progressive rock. Still uniquely Wilson, but they show that his love lies less in prog than in drone, post-punk and similar genres, and only the fusion of all of them brings progressive rock as Steven Wilson understands it and keeps it in mind all along.
“Grace for Drowning” is not a progressive rock album. “Grace for Drowning” isn’t even a music album per se. “Grace for Drowning” is simply art. Art of sounds, letters and, last but not least, images. And if the Greeks had worshipped artists like gods, and Eric Clapton were (supposedly) a god, he’d be Poseidon; because Zeus is Steven Wilson.
author: Tine Kolenik
rating: 10 / 10
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
Line-up:
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
