THE OVERVIEW

Steven Wilson enters 2025 with a dazzling new studio album aiming to be a contemporary musical interpretation of the so-called "overview effect" experienced by astronauts seeing the Earth from space, an experience described as deeply moving and emotional, which is often the case with Wilson's musical ventures. This is the British musician's eighth solo album and is a very welcome and warmly-received return to a more psychedelic-progressive style of writing, at times even reminiscent of his earliest experiments with Porcupine Tree (thinking of 'The Sky Moves Sideways' or 'Metanoia'), and is ideally in a format he has never tackled before as the album is composed of just two lengthy pieces of music, both of which are tied to the overarching concept of the aforementioned "overview effect". Alongside Wilson one shall find the usual cast of collaborators in the likes of Adam Holzman, Craig Blundell and Randy McStine, with Theo Travis making a brief appearance, together with Willow Beggs, Niko Tsonev and Rotem Wilson.

The first part of 'The Overview' album is the 23-minute piece titled 'Objects Outlive Us', a cathartic, complex and incredibly diverse movement that is made up of eight different bits, although the entire piece (and the whole album, in fact) works as a cohesive whole and should be seen as such. Starting off with a choral, enchanting intro, the song gradually moves to a more traditional Wilson-esque progression, with loads of atmospheric keys, haunting acoustic guitars and refined melodies, topped by the picturesque lyrics of Andy Partridge. A more avant-garde instrumental sections awaits the listener later on, similar to some of the material on 'The Harmony Codex', then drifting away into space on the wings of a spacious guitar solo, one of the best on a Steven Wilson recording, authored by McStine. The title track comes second here and is an 18-minute-long movement structured in six parts - this is a much wider, more atmospheric and fluid piece of music, with some spoken word from Wilson's wife and a prevalent use of various effects, synths, and keyboards. An interesting counterbalance to the first part of the album, together with which it forms a very endearing, calming and fascinatingly enticing musical experience, elevated perhaps by the fact that this album is much more pertinent to the progressive roots of the artist yet intelligently claiming enough of his more recent experiments with electronica.

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