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Steven Wilson in Zurich - 15 February 2019
Steven Wilson is the unsung hero of contemporary progressive music. Despite having won last year's Progressive Music Awards for both his latest album To The Bone and generally as UK Band / Artist of the year, there are few outside the alternative music scene that would be able to name him alongside classics of his varied styles such as Pink Floyd or Massive Attack. He does, however, have his die-hard fan following, as demonstrated by the venue-packing crowd turnout at the Volkshaus in Zürich for his 136th gig on his To The Bone album tour. The sixty-minute album was expanded to a gargantuan three-hour set encompassing everything from post-progressive rock to trip hop and (self-described) disco, with only a fifteen-minute intermission at the half-way mark.
What would become a stellar exercise in staging and audio-visual synergy, Wilson's concert opened with a short film projected onto a thin screen suspended in front of the stage. Purportedly intended to gauge the audience reaction to the themes of the night, the video contained images of family, politics, racism and hate, with their associated words interchangeably displayed below, reflecting the confused psychology of today's post-truth and polarised political landscape.
Wilson made clear from his first interaction with the audience that he knows people come to his concerts "to get depressed", acknowledging the (occasionally intensely) bleak nature of his lyrics and music, though his stylistic range is anything but limited. With vocal stylings channeling characteristics from Roger Waters to Thom Yorke and self-taught guitar mastery that easily propels him into the company of prog-rock greats, he consistently proved himself as one of the few true innovators in current music.
The first half of his set focused on the heavier progressive metal of tracks such as Home Invasion and Ancestral (both from 2015's Hand. Cannot. Erase.), interspersed with new material such as the distinctly Floydian The Same Asylum As Before and the solemn Pariah (featuring the line "I'm tired of Facebook"). Giving a brief history of British alternative music from the 1970s through to the present day, including the phenomenal creeping 90s trip hop of Index (one of many songs that built upon itself to levels beyond comprehension), it was abundantly clear that Wilson is not creating neo-progressive rock as a pastiche of past sounds, but rather embodying the post-progressive attitude of touchstones King Crimson and Talk Talk, composing masterpieces of audio-visuals that move, inspire, and shake to the core the musical sensibilities of the audience.
The second half of the set saw Wilson become an evil twin to Jarvis Cocker with his dark parallel universe Pulp supporting his forays into the more disco-oriented and danceable Song of I (the original female vocals contributed by Zürich local Sophie Hunger) and the straight-out-of-Sheffield (by way of Daft Punk) track Permanating. The influence of Talk Talk's The Colour of Spring (1986), noted by Wilson in his description of To The Bone, is clear in both the jazzy distorted guitar and new wave pop textures present in his newest songs, while never forgetting the distinctly present-day themes of technological dissociation and isolation.
As the epic performance slowly drew to a close, the previously present multimedia extravaganza, featuring dazzling psychedelic projections and artful animated sequences, fell away for an intimate encore of Steven Wilson on acoustic guitar, supported only by keyboardist Adam Holzman, as he performed stripped-down versions of Blackfield and Sentimental, from Wilson's projects Blackfield and Porcupine Tree (the latter likely still the most well-known of his musical outfits). The rest of the band, Alex Hutchings on guitar, the man-machine Craig Blundell on drums, and Nicholas Beggs on bass guitar and the chapman stick (a bizarre instrument probably not used since King Crimson's 1981 Discipline), returned to finish the night on a shockwave comprising two powerful final songs. Firstly, Porcupine Tree's catchy but depressing indie track The Sound of Muzak, and finally Wilson's recent heart-rending masterpiece The Raven That Refused To Sing, taken from the 2013 solo album of the same title, which told the story of an elderly man still grieving for his departed sister, accompanied by a sorrowful animation and sung with power and raw melancholy by the man of the hour.
Steven Wilson is like the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, technically unseen but drawing on all that surrounds him and in turn exerting a remarkable influence on our musical constellation. Having collaborated and worked with the likes of King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Yes, Marillion, and Opeth, and considering he was only six years old when Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon and is therefore relatively young by prog-rock standards, Wilson is an utterly refreshing musician to behold in a world rife with lifeless and overly perfected pop music, with thin illusions of depth and connection stretched over giant flatscreens and iPhone-shaped mind-leeches.
His music demands attention and absorbs those willing to open themselves up to its vast psychological explorations and intimate emotionality, all the while providing bombast and technical prowess that is both awe-inspiring and soul-nourishing. Steven Wilson's To The Bone is not just one of last year's finest releases, but he himself is one of the finest musicians working today.
- Miles Prinzen