INSURGENTES

With Insurgentes, Steven Wilson release his first album under his own name (if you except the compilation Unreleased Electronic Music). The first edition (2CD + DVDA), limited, comes with a beautiful 120 page hardback book of photos by Lasse Hoile & Susana Moyaho showing, amongst other things, Steven Wilson and his family. The video extract on the DVDA shows once again S.W.

As with the visual aspect, the music S.W. composed and choosed for this album tries to express personnal tastes, in (all) their variety, using aspects you can alredy find in his numerous and varied other projects.

In his already long career (20 years), he tended to diversify the ways he expressed the high variety of musics he loves and creates. Each facet leading to a new project, well refined : No-Man, Porcupine Tree, Bass Communion, Blackfield...

Here he blends together some of these aspects : noisy music, catchy melodies, changing soundscapes, well worked harmonies, short & quite long tracks, electronic & acoustic sounds... This creates a new sound, even if the style of the artist is very recognizable.

And as usual with SW, the production is of high level, both in stereo and 5.1 mixing.

So, some will say it's not really new, some (a majority ?) will find hard to love all the tracks on this album...

My advice: listen to it on HiFi (5.1 version available on DVDA), hopefully some tracks will please you immediately and the other ones will arouse your curiosity enough to play the album many times, as it did for me... That's what I consider to be enjoyable music : the research of something new (even by blending existing styles together) and well worked, that will take many listening sessions to reveal intelligence and sensibility which leaded to its creation.

5 stars.