4 ½

The clue is in the title: 4 1/2 isn't really a full-fledged new Steven Wilson solo album so much as it's a grab-bag of wayward songs which wouldn't have fit on any of his other solo projects. If we count albums 1-4 as being the run from Insurgentes to Hand. Cannot. Erase. and album 5 as being To the Bone, this sits just outside the usual sequence, with a running time long enough to quality as a short album and short enough to qualify as a long EP.

The material here reminds me a lot of the original songs on Cover Version - in other words, fairly accessible spacey art rock stuff with indie influences, a bit like the material on Porcupine Tree's late 1990s triptych of Stupid Dream, Lightbulb Sun, and Recordings. There's even a Porcupine Tree cover here - Don't Hate Me having originally been recorded by the band on Stupid Dream - and the fact that it slots so well into the sound here only reaffirms to me that this might be Steven Wilson 4 1/2, but you can also see it as Stupid Dream 2.0. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on how you feel about Porcupine Tree's indie-influenced transitional years between their space rock roots and their more prog metal influenced later career.