Perhaps only Steven Wilson himself can truly tell which parts of his prodigious output fit where and why. He is a man of many ciphers: Porcupine Tree, No-Man, Blackfield, IEM and more, and now he has another.
Insurgentes, his solo record of 2009, was strange and beautiful, touched by elements of all of his other voices, but its dark promise was made all the more plaintive by the enthusiasm with which Wilson returned to older things. Since Insurgentes there have been albums by Porcupine Tree and Blackfield, and more work with Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt, and yet they have not quite occupied the same space. Now there’s Grace For Drowning, which does, and which journeys further into Wilson’s experiments with form and sound.
To describe it is to damn it. There is, for example, a 23-minute song, Raider II, which could easily be called jazz rock; there’s the distorted, atonal guitar sprayed over lyrical piano on Deform To Form A Star; there is a spaghetti western vibe to Belle De Jour, followed by the harsh, late-era Radiohead-isms of Index and then the gothic drama of Track One.
Grace For Drowning is an album that can’t really be described, but it urgently calls to be heard.
