Steven Wilson World Tour 2013

Steven Wilson ‘The Raven That Refused to Sing’ Tour 2013

Date: 20 October 2013

Location: Royal Albert Hall, London

Support: n/a (there’s never support at concerts I go to! not sure why…)

Special guests: n/a

Something always goes wrong when I try to go to a concert. Typically this involves large amounts of traffic and/or an inability to find the venue, and consequently arriving any time between five minutes before the band are due on stage and fifteen minutes after. So you can imagine my concern when I arrived at the Royal Albert Hall with almost an hour to go until Steven Wilson started playing. Surely, surely, the worrying lack of problems so far in the night meant we were pretty much guaranteed to have a power outing or a crucial band member suddenly taken ill? But somehow, amazingly, everything managed to happen according to plan. I even managed to buy a glow-in-the-dark T-shirt with the Raven cover art on.

Essentially, this night was particularly important to me because Steven Wilson is someone who I could never forgive myself if I passed up the opportunity to see. (This has been something I’ve had in mind ever since I passed up the chance to see Ian Anderson play Thick as a Brick a couple of years back, and regretted it ever since.) So I went, even though I was really tired and it was the night before I was due to go away.

And at first, honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d made the right decision. The concert opened with a twenty-minute video that consisted mostly of a camera pointed at a single street in London, monitoring the dull occurrences (staged or otherwise) that took place there in a typical day. Eventually, a busker (maybe played by Wilson himself – I’m not sure because the screen was very small and the man’s head was covered by the lighting rig) turned up, took out his guitar, tuned it, and, after an intolerably long pause, began to play the opening notes to ‘Trains’ by Porcupine Tree. At this very moment, Wilson himself walked on stage, carrying his own acoustic guitar, playing along. When he opened his mouth to sing; that was the moment I knew I’d made the right decision to come.

‘Trains’ was but a brief introduction, however, and immediately following it the band plunged into ‘Luminol’, which was the song from The Raven that worked best live. Its larger than life, 70s throwback feel really made it seem like I was travelling back in time, and I could tell everyone on stage was really throwing themselves into it. That’s not to dismiss the album’s other songs, though: ‘The Holy Drinker’, though it lacked Alan Parsons’ guitar solo, had even more power and confidence than the original. ‘The Watchmaker’ kept the delicate beauty of its studio version, and it and ‘Drive Home’ were both kept absolutely believable with the help of Wilson’s vocals. ‘Drive Home’ was accompanied by a video, which like the opening one I had trouble seeing, but what I did see looked like a great and moving accompaniment. The one song that I thought didn’t quite live up to the original was the title track, ‘The Raven that Refused to Sing’ itself, because it lacked the intimacy and clean feel that I like about it, and tried a little too hard to be an epic concert closer.

Of course, there were also a range of songs from Wilson’s two previous albums. The highlight of these was ‘Index’ for sure: already a highlight on Grace for Drowning, its fast-paced psychopathy was magnified on stage and I was half expecting Wilson to leap out into the audience, brandishing a knife – hearing it played like that was a real rush. Another great moment was the condensed, 15-minute version of ‘Raider II’ which was such a good decision for the band, as it kept all the best parts of the original while cutting out the parts that weren’t quite as strong. ‘Sectarian’ made an appearance too, and is notable for being the point in the concert where I had the ‘I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to be here’ moment I have somewhere in every concert, and we were also treated to the melancholy ballad ‘Postcard’, which I wasn’t expecting to work on stage but did, and the single from Insurgentes, ‘Harmony Korine’, which I’ve apparently been pronouncing wrong for years. Oh, yeah, and it was incredibly well played by the entire band, especially the keyboard player.

Just before the interval, Wilson announced that he was premiering a new song, stating ‘Some people are surprised that I’ve written new material already… but I’m old enough to remember a time when it was normal for bands to release an album every year.’ I love the idea; I always love to hear new music and generally do enjoy songs right from the first listen, so it was a great contrast to the other songs that I knew really well. The new song was called ‘Wreckage’ (that night, anyway) and, though unpolished, seems like it’s going to be really, really excellent. It’s very dynamic, combining the high intensity of ‘Luminol’ with the quiet emotion of ‘Drive Home’, as well as something else I can’t quite put my finger on that shows he’s still growing as a songwriter. I have high hopes for his fourth album.

Between songs, Wilson was a great showman and had great interactions with the audience. Towards the beginning, he casually revealed that this was his hundredth solo show. ‘Since I was last here with Porcupine Tree, I’ve made two solo records and played a hundred shows, according to my statistician… or maybe it’s a hundred solo records and two shows, I can never remember.’ Later, he and his keyboard player educated us on the Mellotron. ‘How many of you know what a Mellotron is?’ (Cue a large cheer.) ‘So those of you who are over sixty. It was the first sampling instrument and is particularly famous for its flute and string sounds.’ The player demonstrates by playing a few bars of the introductions to ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘The Court of the Crimson King’. ‘No songs have ever made those sounds famous…’

And as if he hasn’t given us enough great material already, Wilson and band come back after the final Raven number to play ‘Radioactive Toy’ from the first ever Porcupine Tree album. It’s probably the first great song he ever wrote, and it’s a real reminder of where he came from. In true arena-pop-concert style, he offers the audience the microphone to sing the final chorus, and it may only be a couple thousand voices, but everyone gets into it, shouting as loudly and tunelessly as they can ‘Give me a reason to destroy; give me… RADIOACTIVE TOY!’ Then, we’re treated to a space rock improvisation to finish the night – ‘because nobody started using the P-word to describe me until the third or fourth album.’

I’d go back tonight if I could. As that’s not possible, I’ll probably be waiting until the next tour, but I would undoubtedly go back.

Steven Wilson: The Raven That Refused To Sing

The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)

Best song: Take your pick. I think I’ll pick The Watchmaker

Worst song: why? why? why? ok, The Pin Drop

Overall grade: 7

Look, it’s the album that’s in my little icon!

Reviewing my very favourite albums is something of a terrifying prospect, because I know I’ll never be able to do them justice, and I feel that particularly strongly with this one. Today, it is August 6 2013 and I can categorically state that Steven Wilson’s third offering is, without doubt, the best album released this decade so far. I’m fully prepared to re-evaluate this on December 31, 2019, but considering we’re over a third of the way through and there’s been no real competition as of yet… I’d say Mr. Wilson is in with a fair chance of the prize.

Whereas on his first two albums Wilson went a bit crazy having been let loose alone in the studio and started trying out thousands of ideas, most of which worked in fairness, here he finally seems able to stick to one main idea and create a work that is incredibly cohesive, driven, refined and which contains approximately 0.01% filler. It cleverly blends classic symphonic sounds with modern inventiveness and in doing so, fills every possible definition of ‘progressive rock’.

Of course, when I say one main idea, I don’t mean that this is a concept album. (Although somewhere around my third listen I began to see it as based around the concept of winter and loneliness.) Instead, as the title suggests, each one of these songs has its own story to tell. You get to meet a new character every time and hear about their life and often death, usually in quite a twisted way. I guess you could say that this is to a rock opera what a book of short stories is to a novel.

Opener ‘Luminol’ is a clear stylistic throwback to the 70s. I’m not sure what a chemical that makes blood fluoresce has to do with a busker who’s treated as nothing more than part of the scenery, but there you go. It’s jazzy with a lot of different melodies, all of which are interesting, and a particularly brilliant instrumental passage in the first couple of minutes. It’s not heavy on the lyrics at all, in fact they feel more like a special effect like a solo or a fuzz pedal than the focus of the song.

‘Drive Home’ is all about the guitar solo; I believe Guthrie Gogan plays it and it’s fast becoming one of my favourites in studio recordings of music. Prior to the sheer awesomeness of that, the song is a classic ballad but one of Wilson’s absolute best. It really does feel like a late night journey home.

There’s a lot of texture on ‘The Holy Drinker’ that makes the previous two tracks seem sparse in comparison. If we’re sticking with my winter concept, the first two related to the cold and the snow and the outdoors, while this one is indoors in front of a raging fire. I also think of this as the most unique and original part of the album. And the musicians that play here are literally of the highest possible calibre, and hearing them play really makes this song a joy to listen to, although it can seem a bit overwhelming at first with all these players being of an equal standard. I love Adam Holzman’s organ in particular.

‘The Pin Drop’ seems to be the token single, even though it wasn’t officially a single. It’s an objectively “normal” length, has the most energy and the most obvious hooks. I actually think it’s an amazing song that goes through an incredible amount of changes for its length, but even so, if he made a whole album full of Pin Drops I’d consider it selling out.

But the scariest thing of all, scarier than any of these stories, is that even after these four masterpieces the album hasn’t properly hit its stride yet. It does so with the magnificent ‘The Watchmaker’, which contains four minutes of frail beauty which perfectly represent the aged man in the story and the meticulous arranging of tiny parts in his craft. And then that wonderful cascading guitar part comes in and we realise that maybe the watchmaker can feel emotion after all! But after a few more plot twists, the watchmaker dies in a blast of dissonance. It’s perfectly written to tell a story through music with as few words as possible.

Wilson’s voice is at its absolute best and most tender on the title track – in fact there are times when I can’t believe the song isn’t a true story about his own life. The only half-decent word for this is spellbinding in how its dark, wistful atmosphere washes around you, and by the time it reaches the ‘Sing to me, raven…’ part I’m crying. Not many songs have that effect on me. It’s a perfect contrast to the ambitious epic of the previous track and I quite honestly cannot find a fault with it.

I feel like this album is probably full of little tricks and subtleties that I haven’t discovered yet. I can’t wait for it to be twenty years’ time and to be hearing this album, by then an old favourite, and to suddenly sit up and say ‘Hey! I never noticed that before!’

Prog rock in the 70s didn’t really have one person that completely defined the whole movement. These days it does, and that person is Steven Wilson, and he has just released one of the classic albums of the future.

Steven Wilson: Grace For Drowning

Grace For Drowning

Best song: Sectarian

Worst song: why do I make myself do this? perhaps No Part Of Me

Overall grade: 6

“For me the golden period for music was the late sixties and early seventies, when the album became the primary means of artistic expression, when musicians liberated themselves from the 3 minute pop song format, and started to draw on jazz and classical music especially, combining it with the spirit of psychedelia to create “journeys in sound” I guess you could call them. So without being retro, my album is a kind of homage to that spirit.” –Steven Wilson, mid-2011

For his second solo outing, Steven Wilson decided to make a classic prog album and this is how many words he had to use to describe it without actually using the word ‘prog’.

‘Grace For Drowning’ was conceived as a massive double album. I don’t know how he has the time! As well as working on records with some of his bands, like Blackfield and Storm Corrosion, he was remastering stuff for Crimson, Caravan and Tull, he somehow managed to squeeze this project in too. It’s crazy, and the best part is, the quality doesn’t even suffer.

I was originally going to give this a 5 because I think I give out 6s too easily, but then I listened to it again and compared it to some other things I’ve given 6s too, and I definitely like it at least as much as Surrealistic Pillow and Bookends, so I can hardly deny giving it a 6. Plus I’m in a really great mood and I really don’t feel like being stingy with grades or superlatives or anything.

Essentially, this is two albums on two separate discs that both complement and contrast each other. The first one is more conventional and more melodic, while the second one is more sinister and adventurous in its songwriting. You can think of them as day and night, good and evil, childhood and adulthood, whatever. It’s definitely conceivable that somebody could really like one disc and strongly dislike the other, but I’ve always thought they work best as a pair.

The title track is a brief instrumental prelude, piano-based, quietly setting the scene for the album and leading into ‘Sectarian’, a contrast because it has so much going on. I can imagine this busy track being a big old mess in less experienced hands, but Wilson can pull it off fine. The Mellotron’s very prominent on this song, too, giving it a more old fashioned feel. It could almost be an outtake from some 1973-74 King Crimson.

The quieter tracks include ‘Deform to Form a Star’, an introspective vocal ballad that almost seems to have gospel influences, and ‘Postcard’, a very mainstream, very marketable breakup song. I don’t think it loses anything for being this, though. Immediately after it comes ‘Raider Prelude’ which is the darkest part of disc one, and serves as a bridge between the two discs as well as being a teaser for what will come later.

By the time the full song does come around, we’ve already had a couple of other ominous and dramatic songs in a similar vein, so it’s not too much of a shock. These are ‘Track 1’, which I believe is so named because it would be such an atypical opening track for any album; and ‘Index’, a creepy bass and electronic drum-fest with lyrics about a sociopath. It’s very deliberate, and then ‘Raider II’ makes things even more nightmarish because it’s more freeform and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m not sure I can even consider it a song in the traditional sense, more like a musical lab experiment. It’s highly ambitious, dissonant, and at times bordering on unpleasant, it has a wonderful epic climax but then a pointless ending, it has some awesome unpredictable time signatures but some sections of it are overlong, and all these things make it a huge, imperfect achievement.

After being all shaken up by this piece, the conclusion of ‘Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye’ brings me back down to earth slowly. It’s calm and unhurried and I’m big into the twin guitar solo in the middle of it, but I can’t decide if I like the ending or not. It’s either a clever way of making the transition from the world of this album to the real world as seamless as possible, or it’s pointlessly just there.

 If you get the deluxe edition, there’s a third disc with a bunch of other songs and also a work-in-progress version of ‘Raider II’, which is a great find from the point of view of someone like me who has no idea how one might go about writing a 23-minute song. Even to get a little part of the thought process along the way is really cool.

In conclusion: I don’t think this album is Wilson’s greatest work; it’s still very sprawling and a bit all over the place, but if he never makes something on this scale again, then it might well be the magnum opus that he’s remembered for in the future. That would make sense – it shows many different sides of his musical personality and displays his vision and ambition to the full. 

Steven Wilson: Insurgentes

Insurgentes

Best song: Salvaging

Worst song: Twilight Coda

Overall grade: 5

Author’s note: I know, I know. I said I wouldn’t review an artist’s solo career before I was done with their band work, and I’ve broken that rule after not even a month. But I’m going to see Steven Wilson in October (already counting down to this!) and I really want to have his solo stuff reviewed by then – and besides, he has so many bands that it would take me years to review everything associated with his name. But I will definitely review Porcupine Tree after, and maybe Blackfield, and maybe Storm Corrosion.

Steven Wilson is a music reviewer’s dream. He has a kind of musical vision and creativity that I can’t even begin to imagine – every project he’s put his name to has been in a very different style from the last, and he seems to be able to work with all these different projects simultaneously. Despite this or because of this, it took around eighteen years for him to release a real solo album, although there were a few singles before this, mostly covers that are complete rearrangements of the originals. Now, I do have a minor obsession with the guy that’s similar to my minor obsessions with Rick Wakeman and Brian Eno, but I’ll be the first to admit that this album is flawed. In all previous efforts, Wilson’s had a writing partner, someone to filter through and edit everything he might write. It’s possible that at this point he hasn’t worked out how to do this for himself, and the record suffers for it.

This album is probably most similar in style to the earliest Porcupine Tree work, yet echoes can be found of all Wilson’s collaborations. For example, that gorgeously melodic opening to the first song, ‘Harmony Korine’ is quite reminiscent of his work with Blackfield. It’s a good title for it too, as the song does seem to be very harmonious and peaceful throughout. There’s no dissonance or real heaviness, yet it still seems to be first and foremost a rock song.

The next ‘Abandoner’ is very different with its distorted drum intro and much clearer vocals. The middle section to this one is almost ambient, and passages similar to this one appear in quite a few songs on the record. As this is, above all, an album that you should sit down and properly listen to, I think some of these kind of sections could be trimmed down, but none of them have ridiculous lengths – just when your mind starts to wander completely, you’re jolted back into the music by some interruption. In this song’s case, it’s a sudden burst of static white noise.

I really love ‘Salvaging’, one of the longer tracks here, which is evil and foreboding in both the instrumentation and Steven’s vocals. It seems like a kind of tarnished beauty, and now that I think about that more, that could be the theme for the entire album. It’s full of beautiful melodies which are constantly being interrupted or tainted.

The album’s a little schizophrenic in places, with Wilson taking inspiration from many different genres of music. A couple of tracks, ‘Veneno Para Las Hadas’ (translation: poison for the fairies) and ‘Get All You Deserve’ are very slow and close to shoegaze. They could put you in a trance if you’re not careful. But then there’s ‘Only Child’, which is the album’s heaviest song that’s nothing if not post-punk, considering how dark and rhythmic it is. ‘No Twilight Within The Courts Of The Sun’ (man, these titles are eating into my word count) is the big centrepiece and it’s very experimental, while ‘Significant Other’ has an actual hook! Shocking stuff!

Wilson himself claims to love producing records more than anything else, and I don’t claim to be an expert on this but I can’t find a single fault with the production here. It’s varied and interesting, always fitting with the songs without being the thing that defines them.

One thing this album does do is fulfil the literal meaning of ‘progressive rock’. Every song changes partway through and ends up in a different place to where it started. The album as a whole, however, is very cyclical, as the title track refers back to the opener… an invitation to put the whole thing on repeat? Sure, why not?