Steven Wilson - The Overview (2025)

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Steven Wilson - The Overview (2025)

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The title of Steven Wilson's eighth solo album refers to the "overview effect," a cognitive shift astronauts experience from looking at our world from space, like deities and/or exiles. It's an unabashed return to progressive rock after experimenting with pop forms and electronics on several early-2000s recordings. The Overview is a 41-minute set consisting of two labyrinthine multi-part suites; their sub-sections all seamlessly segue into one another. Wilson's band includes keyboardist Adam Holzman, guitarist Randy McStine, and drummers Craig Blundell and Russell Holzman.

The first half is represented by the eight-part "Objects Outlive Us." "Monkey's Paw" features the leader's layered falsetto vocals, upright bass, and sound design by McStine. "The Buddha of the Modern Age" offers multi-part vocal harmonies and piano, and channels inspiration from Queen and Yes, with McStine and Willow Beggs (Nick's daughter) assisting in the dreamy vocal chorale. "Objects Meanwhile" contains lyrics by XTC's Andy Partridge that juxtapose everyday life with cosmic events. Over six minutes, Wilson and the band (with Theo Travis on sax) launch headlong into prog. The poetic lyrics are initially adorned with piano, organ, acoustic guitars and bass, and string sounds. After a gorgeous, nearly majestic instrumental interlude, a deep, distorted bassline (à la Rush's Geddy Lee) claims the fore and the track moves into overdrive with twinned guitars, drums, keys, and synths before an organ ties them together then returns to its original architecture. The instrumental "The Cicerones" offers an acoustic guitar playing in waltz time. Synth and string sounds appear before drums add ballast, power, and the rest of the band, who launch "Ark." "Cosmic Sons of Toil" is three minutes of instrumental prog with a killer guitar break and roiling bassline around Holzman's Rhodes piano and thudding drums from son, Russel.

"The Overview" is in six parts and commences with "A Perspective." Introduced by white noise, a pulsing synth is joined by a swirling Mellotron that deliberately suggests Pink Floyd's "On the Run," with Rotem Wilson (Steven's spouse) narrating measurements in space from megameter to yottameter. "Beauty Infinity I" and "Borrowed Atoms" offer celestial-sounding sonics from Holzman as Wilson sings, "Snow is falling, but it can't be seen from here/Back on earth, my loving wife's been dead for years…." It's a long, delayed, and utterly beautiful response to David Bowie's "Space Oddity." Rotem returns to her recitation – more stridently this time – on "Infinity Measured in Moments." Its double-time drums are an engine: guitars, keys, and string sounds emerge from it before a vocal/chorus and bridge bring it home. Closer "Permanence" is a dreamy, spacy, instrumental duet from Wilson (sound design) and Travis (soprano saxophone).

The Overview is a loopy conceptual masterpiece. It ponders the infinitesimally tiny place of humans in the endless space of the universe. There's a lot going on here in composition, performance, and production, but it's always focused, never excessive, and always accessible; in some places, it actually approaches the profound.

~ Thom Jurek, All Music