Former Porcupine Tree man Steven Wilson excels his ambitions on solo album number six…
Words: James Hickie
If you want an insight into why The Future Bites sounds the way it does, look no further than the album’s fourth track, 12 THINGS I FORGOT, and the lyric, ‘
I just sit in the corner complaining / Making out things were best in the eighties’. We can’t attest to Steven Wilson’s status as a curmudgeon – he’s always seemed a jolly nice bloke to us – but he’s certainly made no secret here of his love for the music from the ‘Greed decade’.
/ 28 January 2021 1849 Views
Expecting the unexpected has been the listener’s default position since Steven Wilson called time on Porcupine Tree and embarked on an increasingly storied solo career. Since 2008’s eclectic debut Insurgentes, he’s done a jazz-inflected opus (Grace For Drowning), indulged his love of classic prog (The Raven That Refused To Sing) and inched ever closer to the mainstream via the poignant Hand. Cannot. Erase. and the eminently accessible To The Bone. Whether he likes it or not, Wilson remains prog’s poster boy and he teeters on the very tipping point of major mainstream success as he releases his sixth full-length solo LP. At such a stage, lesser performers might freeze like rabbits in the headlights and bottle it completely or play it safe and simply whack out To The Bone Vol 2. If you’ve followed Wilson’s career, though, it won’t surprise you to discover he’s stuck his neck out and done something completely different wi