Steven Wilson Pure Stars (Vinyl, Bootleg) ***Steven Wilson Insurgentes (CD+DVD, Kscope Records, 2008) ****
Storm Corrosion Grace For Drowning (CD, Kscope Records, 2011) *****
Storm Corrosion Storm Corrosion (CD, Roadrunner Records, 2012) ****
Steven Wilson Get All You Deserve (CD+DVD, Kscope Records, 2012) *****
Steven Wilson The Raven That Refused To Sing (and Other Stories) (CD, Kscope Records, 2013) *****
Steven Wilson Drive Home (CD, Kscope Records, 2013) ****
Steven Wilson Cover Version (CD, Kscope Records, 2014) ***
Steven Wilson Hand. Cannot. Erase. (CD, Kscope Records, 2015) *****
Steven Wilson Transience (CD, Kscope Records, 2015) ****
Steven Wilson 4 1/2 (CD, Kscope Records, 2016) ****
Steven Wilson To the Bone (CD, Caroline International Records, 2017) *****
Steven Wilson The Future Bites (CD, Caroline International Records, 2021) ***
Steven Wilson The Harmony Codex (CD, Virgin Records, 2023) ***
Steven Wilson The Overview (Vinyl, Fiction Records, 2025) *****
Genre: Prog rock
Places I remember: FOPP, HMV, Fives, JB Hi Fi, Real Groovy Records
Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: Drive Home (The Raven..)
Gear costume: Permanating (To the Bone)
They loom large in his legend (The Album Collection playlists): Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8
Active compensatory factors: If you type Steven Wilson into my search bar, an awful lot of entries come up for him and his various musical vehicles. Some of which have already featured in lengthy posts. Yes, I'm talking about you Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No-Man, and Bass Communion. In 2008 Steven decided to embark on a solo career as well as maintaining interest in those other projects.
Pure Stars is a bootlegged solo performance - live at the Jah-Pan Club, Tel Aviv, Israel in January 2003. It's a very intimate performance where he takes requests and plays some Porcupine Tree songs on his acoustic guitar. His between song patter is terrific and he comes across as a cool dude, albeit a nerdy cool dude. His attempt at Blackest Eyes on the acoustic is a treat!
Insurgentes was the first album under his name, and it's a bit of a triumph. If sounds a lot like Porcupine Tree style prog in places, with some echoes of Pink Floyd and even some Zappa-esque guitar angularity featured on it along with some drone and patently experimental approaches. It's an important album for him in that his name is above the door and he's free to do whatever he wants.
Grace For Drowning came next, in 2011. This time it doesn't sound much like Porcupine Tree. Instead, it's quite a jazzy album with some beautiful passages along its double CD length (he doesn't do anything by halves). It feels like another big leap forward to my ears.
While working on Grace For Drowning, Steven was also working with his mate, Mikael Åkerfeldt from Opeth. That work emerged after Grace under the project name Storm Corrosion.
It wasn't metal machine music at all, instead it was acoustic in approach while also retaining an experimentalism of spirit. The Guardian review got things spot on, stating the album "...could confound and irritate as many as they enchant, but as an immersive journey into uncharted territory, Storm Corrosion is an unequivocal triumph".
Get All You Deserve is a live package (2xCD plus a DVD) of a live show in Mexico City while on the Grace For Drowning tour. Apart from a couple of ambient pieces, all of the songs performed are from his first two solo albums - Insurgentes and Grace For Drowning.
It's a terrific package which captures the band at a peak - the nearly 30 minute version of Raider II is exceptional for the interplay between the band. Those 30 minutes fly by!
The next studio album is The Raven That Refused To Sing (and Other Stories). Another big album - he is certainly a prolific over-achiever. It's a superb jazz fusion album with the group of familiar players from the Grace tour locked together throughout.
The Guardian was again very sympathetic, deciding the album contained "all manner of wildly evocative soundscapes, melodic crescendos and mellotron-drenched fever dreams".
Drive Home was technically an EP, rather than an album. It's a compilation of music videos on a DVD, previously unreleased tracks, and live versions of several songs on the CD. The seven tracks make it one track longer than The Raven...so it's a very very generous EP!
Cover Version, a combination of Steven Wilson originals and covers,is an interesting detour. It leads with Thank You. It always takes me a while to figure out that it's not a Steven Wilson original. Other notable versions are created for A Forest and Sign 'O' The Times and Donovan's Lord of the Reedy River.
Hand. Cannot. Erase. was his fourth solo album. It's a brilliant concept album, inspired by the case of Joyce Carol Vincent, a young woman living in a large city who died in her apartment and no one missed her for over two years, despite her having family and friends.
Everything about H. C. E. captures my attention - the music is superb, like The Raven... and the story follows through the very poignant subject matter with a light touch. A masterpiece!!
I've included the compilation, Transience, as it neatly collects 13 songs from the 2003 to 2015 solo period. It's worth it for the rerecording of his song Lazurus alone! It's a Porcupine Tree song originally, so technically this is a cover. It's followed by Drive Home - another of my favourites. Overall, it serves as an excellent introduction to his solo work.
4 1/2 is another EP. So named because it came after his fourth solo album (The Ravern...) and To The Bone, his fifth. This time there are 6 songs - he's very generous!
All were songs written during the sessions for The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) and Hand. Cannot. Erase. All are superb prog rock songs. He was been in a rich vein of form from 2011 onwards.
That high quality continues with To the Bone. This time it was a much more commercial approach - with the accent on shorter, poppier songs while still retaining a prog feel, similar to Peter Gabriel, Tears for Fears, and Radiohead's approach: experimental, progressive, but with melodic hooks.
A whopping five singles were released to support the album - Pariah, The Same Asylum As Before, Song of I, Permanating, and Refuge. No surprise then that this album became his biggest seller.
I've already written about the live album released in 2018 that came from the To the Bone tour - Home Invasion: In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall (you can find it here), so the next album in my collection is The Future Bites. This was his fifth solo studio album, coming after a four-year gap because of the covid-19 pandemic.
The album takes a prog approach in terms of its concept - a pulse taking of the here and now, rather than a dystopian vision of the future. The progressive pop music from To the Bone morphs more into synth-pop this time, as it leans on more electronic sounds than previously.
I'm not a big fan of that approach, hence the three star rating, but I respect his ideas and on-going creative, progressive search for new things which slide between various genres. That search, and the leaning on electronica, continued with The Harmony Codex - his seventh solo studio effort, in 2023.
As the Classic Rock reviewer said, The Harmony Codex 'is an hour-plus of music that glides seamlessly from skittering digital soul to Gilmouresque soft guitars to colossal riffing to eerie spoken word to honeyed tunefulness.'
That brings us more or less up-to-date with last year's The Overview. A masterful old school prog concept album that has a 20 minute song suite on each side. It was high on my end of year list of the best albums.
The concept centres on the 'overview effect', a cognitive shift astronauts experience from looking at the Earth from space. The music and the ideas are complex and reward repeat visits. It's one of those records that I will return to many times in the future.
The Pink Floyd-isms are often a lazy comparison by reviewers, but this album is probably the one that takes their influence and runs with it the most. That's high praise btw.
Where do they all belong? The completist impulse in me will continue for Steven Wilson's albums (he has a new solo one out this year) - whether that's solo or his many projects, although I draw the line at buying re-releases with extra bonus tracks. I'm not made of money!
Basically, jazz-fusion is a genre of music that describes when jazz harmony and improvisation is used within a rock music context. Larry and John's electric guitars along with electric bass and drums take off in improvised ways on Spaces - sometimes it sounds like they shoot off in four different directions. The thrill comes from that experimentation when everything jells. Then this music is inspirational. Like on track 1, side 2 -Wrong is Right. Here endeth the lesson.
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