Artwork for illustrated/photographed by Hajo Muller and designed by Carl Glover.
Style: Progressive rock, art rock, ambient (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Rush, Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, John Hopkins, and a little band called Porcupine Tree
Country: United Kingdom
Release date: 14 March 2025
On November 3rd, 1967, Robert McNamara, the US Defence Secretary under President Lyndon Johnson, announced that the Soviets were developing a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, a nuclear missile that would reside in low Earth orbit, ready to be fired from space. It was an escalation in Cold War tensions and another driving force that would eventually lead to the USA winning the space race by landing a man on the moon just two years later. Steven Wilson could conceivably have heard this announcement if there were a radio in the room he was born in in Kingston Upon Thames, London, that same day.
Wilson is a man who needs no introduction, but he’s getting one regardless. Be it Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No-Man, Storm Corrosion, or his countless remixes and remasters of classic prog rock and heavy metal, if you know anything about modern progressive music, you know his name. His solo career arguably contains his best work, a boundless journey across the art rock and prog spectrum, from the noisy alternative rock of solo debut Insurgentes to the classic prog worship of The Raven That Refused to Sing to the post-punk and art pop influenced The Future Bites. Wilson has consistently experimented and evolved with each new release. His eighth album, The Overview, is named for the perspective-altering effect that being able to see the entire planet has upon astronauts’ sense of self1, and resides in the empyrean realm where the landing of “Staircase” left us at the close of The Harmony Codex: ‘miles above the surface of the earth’ contemplating ‘a trillion stars in a billion galaxies.’
At a svelte forty-two minutes, The Overview is comprised of two epic suites, Thick as a Brick style: “Objects Outlive Us” and “The Overview”, themselves subdivided into several smaller sections. Shades of Wilson’s solo career can be heard throughout, but its clearest antecedent is a blend of the eclecticism and scope of The Harmony Codex with the progressive sensibility of Hand Cannot Erase, heard most obviously in those grandiloquent chords and the guitar tone. However, in typical Wilsonian fashion, The Overview defies easy comparison, and fans will certainly hear elements of his entire discography, as well as a grab-bag of his pet influences.
Piano leads just as often as guitars, and the two instruments provide a bold contrast between serene and charged sections, from cosmic voyage to quantum turbulence. This is the fundamental dichotomy underlying The Overview; space as dreamlike wonder, space as existential terror. Without wanting to give a blow-by-blow account of the music, from the pensive opening atmospherics of “Objects Outlive Us” we enter a chant with Wilson’s vocals layering with each stanza to become a legion reproving humanity’s rapacious exploitation of the planet, ‘no longer able to find some kind of perspective amongst all the invective.’ From here piano leads us into a proggier section, a repeating motif that draws us into the central song, a more stereotypical Wilsonian affair with lyrics penned by Andy Partridge (XTC), segueing into a clearly Rush influenced section where the bass thrums with energy… and we’re not even halfway through the track! Both suites continue to unfold in distinct sections—hitting a heavy riff, back into a gossamer verse, dissolving into dreamy ambient, exploding into a chaotic solo—a little disjointed at times, but with an overarching sense of organisation.
There are riffs and solos where one can hear Wilson and lead guitarist Randy McStine channel Rush (“The Cicerones”) or King Crimson (“Cosmic Sons of Toil”). Drums are contributed by Russell Holzman (Caroline Polachek, son of Adam) and Craig Blundell (Frost* and regular Wilson collaborator) on the respective tracks and both contribute fine work; Holzman a bit of a foil for Harrison in his steady nuance. Meanwhile, Blundell a little under-utilised in the earlier sections of “The Overview”, but allowed to go ham, as is his perpetual wont, later on, unleashing his kit-sojourning style. “The Overview”, meanwhile, opens with “Perspective” in ambient electronica fashion, layering in complex beats and new layers of synth over the top—Wilson as John Hopkins student. Around nine minutes into the title track, it all goes a bit starman with funky Bowie-esque moog, and Wilson putting on a little Ziggy in his delivery. “Permanence”, the section which closes the record, drifts into Tangerine Dream inflected ambient. The bass work (Wilson and McStine) may well be the instrumental highlight, frequently channeling Geddy Lee and Chris Squire in its dominant tone and pleasingly complex riffing. One gets the feeling that Wilson has decided to make space his playground, and he’s rather enjoying cramming its infinity with all his favourite influences.
A more curious feature of The Overview is in the production. Wilson is undoubtedly a genius producer—his ubiquity on classic prog rock and heavy metal remasters is testament to that—and his style is usually drenched in atmosphere. The Overview, however, is much more raw, airless, and the central instrument in a given moment, be it piano, guitar, voice, synth, tends to dominate the mix, with the other instruments providing set dressing. Evoking the suffocation of space seems a conscious decision—in space no one can hear you say “there’s no atmosphere.” There are distinctly ambient sections, but these ebb and flow as needed. Curiously, this decision is of a piece with Wilson’s upcoming restoration of Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii concert, of which he says his production job is less ambient because he wanted to evoke how the band sounded on that particular day for that particular performance, which happened to be a far more arid sound than typical. Whether the Pink Floyd remaster influenced The Overview’s production, I don’t know, but there’s a peculiar synchrony between the two. Nevertheless, it works, and the production seems even more capacious, as though each instrument is a body in orbit and their relative distance defines their volume.
The Overview isn’t without issues, the main one being the grating spoken word on the title track. A robotic female voice recites a litany of celestial objects and their sizes for a baffling length of the track—’Tarantula Nebula: size beyond one zettametre, 10^21’—and Wilson reprises the idea twice. Spoken word in music is hit or miss (and usually the latter) but this particular idea is a rather artless way of conveying the sheer size of planets and nebulae. It has neither the wit of the shopping list recitation from “Personal Shopper”, nor the emotional thrust of the narration on “Perfect Life”, which is a shame because the bulk of the track might well be the album’s jewel were it not for this glaring annoyance. The disjointedness of the suites is also notable given the lead instrument often changes with each new section, and while a suite can get away with some choppier transitions (looking at you, “Closer to the Edge”) than a through-composed work, some of these nevertheless feel a tad jarring. Every section is consummate in and of itself and the sense of progression is always logical, but there are moments when the stitched-together-ness is a tad Frankensteinian. “Objects Outlive Us” suffers more from this, despite being consciously arranged around a nineteen note theme which is revisited in different time signatures, keys and the like, but it’s also, to my mind, the stronger of the two tracks. When you’re playing with twenty minute epics, contradictions abound.
Andy Partridge’s lyrics for “Objects: Meanwhile” juxtapose banal everyday tragedies with cosmic events, and the whole section is very Hand Cannot Erase; a little cliché, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t come to like the playfulness, ironies, and sincerity. On the title track, Wilson’s astronaut drops the fact that ‘back on earth my loving wife’s been dead for years’—my man can’t resist giving his characters a tragic backstory. The most arresting lyrical idea is the one which bookends “Objects Outlive Us”, with Wilson contemplatively crooning ‘And there in the mist you asked me: ‘Did you forget I exist?’ I said ‘yes, ‘cause you played too hard to get’; It’s a beautiful and quite profound epitaph for our falling out of love with the empyrean. Wilson was two when humanity first landed on the moon, but since then our fascination with the cosmos has dulled. We thought the future lay up there but when the Cold War dulled, the money ran out and we became wrapped up in our petty terrestrial squabbles. Space wouldn’t bend to our whims, and so we abandoned it.
As “The Overview” closes we’re treated to ambient synth notes colliding and fading like little atomic disturbances, as though we’re at the furthest extent of the universe, a place infinity continues to expand into and yet there’s nothing except these faint glimmers of something that may be a precursor to life. Four years out from the 60th anniversary of the moon landing, it seems that art is the only transport that will take us to such realms. We won’t terraform Mars, no matter how much uneducated megalomaniac billionaires think we might2. Wilson has always been a very human artist, and while his foray into outer space isn’t without blemishes, it’s an ambitious and emotionally-centred record, worthy of a musician of his calibre and another broadly successful entry into his storied discography.
Recommended tracks: there’s only two but if you’ve only time for one, go for Objects Outlive Us
You may also like: Esthesis, Smalltape, Mile Marker Zero
Final verdict: 8/10
- In a Q&A, Wilson remarked that the astronautical testimonial that struck him most was that of William Shatner, the erstwhile Enterprise captain who was treated to a sojourn into space courtesy of Jeff Bezos’ phallic rocket. Back on terra firma, Shatner reflected that it “felt like a funeral”. Out there was nothing, death; all the life was in the place he’d just left. ↩︎
- It has no magnetosphere. Terraforming Mars is virtually impossible, and if we did do it, the amount of energy involved would basically destroy Earth and make a far inferior alternative. The worst of both worlds, which does feel like the Musk guarantee. ↩︎
Related links: Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Fiction Records – Facebook | Official Website
Steven Wilson is:
– Steven Wilson (vocals, guitars, keyboards, sampler, bass, percussion, programming)
– Randy McStine (guitars)
– Adam Holzman (keyboards)
– Russell Holzman (drums on “Objects Outlive Us”
– Craig Blundell (drums on “The Overview”)
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