STEVEN WILSON

I'll begin this review with a confession. Although I've never disliked Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, etc., for years I considered Steven Wilson to be extremely overrated. I understood the appeal but never the widespread obsession -- fans and the press alike were treating him like the new prog messiah, and I simply didn't get it.

Recently, on the strength of "Luminol" (courtesy of Prog magazine's CD sampler), I thought there just might be a little something more going on, so I picked up The Raven that Refused to Sing (and Other Stories). I had the privilege of listening start to finish on a long drive alone...and I almost had to pull over more than once because I was so overcome by how amazing this album is. The musicians are stellar, the sound is pristine but wonderfully organic, and the songs are powerful enough to create their own worlds and instantly transport the listener there.

This is one of the few albums I continue to play straight through on every listen, without skipping a moment. That said, certain moments do stand out. One of my personal favorites is that section from 7:10 to about 8:50 in "The Watchmaker." Against such a macabre lyrical backdrop, those layered vocals are so haunting and beautiful that I was reduced to tears on the first couple of listens (and still get chills every time) -- and that's saying something for a singer who generally struck me as average to mediocre.

Despite my ambivalence about some of his other work, I have no reservations in calling The Raven that Refused to Sing an absolute masterpiece. This is the stuff of genius.

I really like the sound of the album, and the musicians are awesome! So much interaction and sparkling, playful groove happens all the time, and also the sounds that the players choose (e.g. on the keyboards) are really tasteful and, in parts, innovative. The bass player sticks out a bit: Great guy, groove is in the heart really.

But I agree to some other people who argued that the instrumentalists' perfection and the cool and modern production serves too much as a red herring; the musical ideas themselves are far from new. Maybe that is not too bad in itself, although I always like to take the "progressive" of Progressive Rock literally, but a matter of taste - and maybe of balance between references and new approaches.

This is where Raven really loses. Grace for Drowning is by far the better album if you consider the richness of ideas and its individuality. Raven is not bad, but it is also not really worth such a fuzz if you take into account how much it owes to King Crimson...

A certain kind of mindset is helpful if you really want to like that album.

It really helps to have a vaguely nostalgic warmth down in your belly when you remember your youthful first approaches to, say, Close to the Edge and Selling England.

It definitely requires an optimist worldview: You would never, say, get suspicious about the fact that someone who has just - with lots of fanfares and great publicity - re-mastered the whole back catalogue of about every seventies prog hero in the world... well, that that someone now hits the road with an album that completely sticks to this kind of prog - although he had never before even hinted upon that direction? Surely you would consider this artistic, uhm, patina sticking to Wilson, not commercial cleverness.

You also need to be easily led by brilliant sound (oh yes, it definitely sounds brilliant!) and great instrumentalists (yes, they are fantastic!). So much that you do not question the, say, pedigree of the actual notes that Wilson just used. This is crucial: If you don't do that, you might end up muttering furious comments about plagiarism and stuff. People will shake your heads on you then! Be warned: No one wants to hear that riffs of Luminol are almost blueprints of Red!

Because, after all, the album is so much fun for everyone.

Maybe this is misleading... Of course, Raven IS essential, but I doubt that it is essential in a sense that Progarchives think of...

The essence of progressive rock has been stirred, shaken and then poured, sweet and tasty, into a stylish glass with a nice umbrella and strange exotic fruit to match it. Yes, I definitely want to take a sip. And when I had the first one, I want more. Why is that so? Because I know the taste and I connect it to younger years when Prog was young and I was easier to impress. Because the years are always thought of with nostalgia and a faint twinkle.

And I am grateful for that. But when it comes to the music, I am not so sure whether it does not rather work as a very intelligently styled psychological viral. There are so many references to classic prog that I do not know whether one should call it an hommage or plagiarism... Indeed, Wilson often did not even bother to compose decent transitions or to mask these references at least a bit. So, no, this is not essential, it is just drawn from the essence.

Of course, the album is fun. It is as much fun as thumbing through old photo albums with yellowed pages. But as little as these photographs can score in means of actual quality - thus little can this album convince me of its plusses. I feel misled and manipulated. What a coincidence that Wilson published it just after he finished mastering the classics and thereby found his way to the more classic-prog-oriented buyers.

I was excited to do this review bacause of its previous high rating and I wonder how new good progressive rock sounds. Worth saying is that Steven Wilson is totally new to me and what I hade heard of Porcupine Tree didn't get me impressed. So I wondered what this was and of course I allways want to give it so many stars as possible so let's start.

After listening to this record I am impressed of many things, especially the production seems to be fantastic. The music is very coherent and the musicians are fabulous. It sounds new but there is also many similarities with older prog. "Luminol" is an excillent starter, fast and melodical and we meet a flute and a great keyboard. That is my favourite track along with "The Holy Drinker" which is another marvelous track that shows us this guy can play progressive forward minded rock. The record is full of great melodies and organisations of them. What is lowering this music is that Wilson seems to be a mediocre singer. I dont feel there's emotions there and the song also drowns in the rest. Sometimes this music is very advanced and contains a lot of gems to lose oneself in and this is definitely a record to play again. But it is not a masterpiece as many say, It's just a good and talanted piece of music.

Insurgentes is fueled by an intense and dark internal fire. It has a life of its own. A strongly atmospheric and rather personal exposé, it comes across as vivid and naked in its urgent, intense delivery and truly stands out in comparison to what I've previously heard from the man.

Skillfully combining various atmospheric and texture-heavy types of music like ambient, shoegaze, post-rock, noise rock and industrial with progressive and alternative rock is what we're dealing with here. And a fair bit of experimental aptitude in putting all these disparate influences together and making it all feel cohesive and valid. I find it appealingly hard to generalize and summarize. It's a fractured, eventful experience, but connected by broad brush-strokes of shared moods and instrumentation.

Waves of soaring melancholy and gritty frustration collide with a strangely melliflous and appealing sense of sorrow on Insurgentes. It comfortably juggles bleak introspection, intimacy and isolation with more direct and expressive outbursts, but always remains firmly rooted in the darker, more conflicted part of the emotional spectrum. You won't find a lot of happiness here. Instead the warped, near-dystopian urban alienation and isolation would find a perfect physical companion in a cold drizzle over your smoggy, disintegrating industrial wasteland of choice. Gloomy. But never dehumanized. There's immense passion (and longing!) that lie just beneath the surface, ready to come to the surface when given an opening. The stark contrast just makes it all the more heart-wrenching and cleansing when it shines through.

Luscious, bitter-sweet delicacies from a distantly ringing, picked guitar and a fragile piano, musical box, glockenspiel or other contraption generate soundscapes of childlike innocence and nostalgia. Atmospheric synthesizers mystifies and sets the scene. Suddenly everything erupts in lashes of triumphant guitar glory. A shimmering, vibrating wall of sound, striving for the light. Primal, screechy mess meets tender melodiousness. A wash of processed noise over a trip-hop rhythm segues into a more ambient and melodic electronic voyage. Snarly, repetitive bass riffs and dexterous, fluid and fiery guitar soloing and some disciplined, angular guitar riffs. Strings! All of a sudden there are lush and beautiful strings! An indistinct fusion of soaring guitar and electronics next to abrasive, industrial noise that grows into vortexes of insanity. Back to a mellow and melancholic ballad, with a gifted mix of pop hooks and atmosphere. Some scathing, heavy guitar passages that recall King Crimson, complete with nervous and slightly ominous keys as contrast. Dreary and oppressive background noise buzzes and hisses under a plaintive, minimalistic piano and some vague, fractured and screechy guitar. Thundering, lingering chords hang doom-like over anxious, ever more invasive floods of jarring electronic drones.

A potent, but possibly toxic brew.

Additionally, I adore how structures fall apart, dissolve and expand into texture and ambient brilliance rather than conform to Wilson's characteristic stop/start, mellow/heavy, dark/light, spacey/riffy dualisms. They're still there, but borders are blurred and composition freer, choosing to expand and bring forward more tangential sounds and colours that otherwise would have been confined to a background role. It's a freer, more organically evolving group of compositions. The attention to detail is stunning and everything feels like it's in its right place, but it never comes across as planned, calculated or expected. And that goes for the moods and emotions on the albums as well. They come together in nuanced, complex and often contradictory ways that perhaps more than anything add to the sprawl and emotional impact of Insurgentes.

5 stars. Some serious stuff.

//LinusW

Because of Steven Wilson's (relative) popularity as a modern progressive artist, it's almost inevitable that The Raven that Refused to Sing will become the biggest prog album of 2013. The reception so far has been resoundingly positive, as I would expect, and while I can't agree with all the praise that has been heaped on this release so far, this is still definitely a solid modern prog album. It might not do anything radically different, but it's still well worth the investment (if you don't have it already, of course).

First of all, the musicianship here is really, really good. This isn't a collection of highly skilled session musicians, as on Wilson's previous two solo efforts, but a genuine band (with incredible chemistry). Marco Minnermann proves himself to be an absolute beast on the drums: precise, versatile, and very, very skilled. His work combines with Nick Beggs's incredible bass playing to form a powerhouse rhythm section (just listen to the first few minutes of Luminol). Guthrie Govan and Adam Holzman each contribute some amazing solos on guitar and keys (respectively), and though Theo Travis's work on flute and sax doesn't always jump out quite as much as the others, I'm always glad to hear it.

Of course, musicianship is of no consequence if the compositions aren't of high quality. And for the most part, they are. Even if the tracks aren't perfectly constructed, they are all (at a minimum) very memorable. The sections of ambient noise that plagued his previous two albums are gone. The strongest one, by far, is the closing title track. Ironically, despite all the good things I've said about the musicianship, this song features the sparsest instrumentation on the album. But this actually works to its advantage. The simple accompaniment serves to accentuate the wonderful lyrics (about an old man remembering his sister who died when he was very young) and Steven's perfect, emotional delivery. Indeed, this song does a better job of conveying sheer sadness than nearly any other I have heard. That's a very strong statement, I admit, but I'm sticking by it.

The other songs can't hope to match the greatness of the closer, but they're still pretty strong. The only issue I have is that, while they certainly all have enough ideas to keep the listener engaged from point A to point B, Wilson's songs simply don't always fit together all that well. Take 'Luminol,' for example. After the opening, jazzy, bass led section, we have a quiet vocal part, then a mellotron solo, then a piano solo, and finally a fast, guitar led section to close things out. The playing is great, of course, but I'm still at a loss as to how the different sections relate to each other, or how anything but the main vocal bit relates to the song's central theme (of a man who continues playing songs on the street after death takes him). It does keep me engaged for twelve minutes (and I enjoy it, I really do!), but the composition just doesn't make any logical sense. Thankfully, the construction of the other long tracks' 'The Holy Drinker' and 'The Watchmaker'' while still nowhere near perfect, exhibits much less of this problem, and the shorter tracks are almost totally immune. Other than the closing 'Raven,' 'Drive Home,' with its irresistible vocal melody in the first half, and breathtaking guitar break in the second, is the best constructed thing on the album, even if it doesn't try to do anything particularly ambitious. As a matter of fact, this was the song that drew me in before any of the others, and it's not hard to see why. Give it a listen, and just see if you can get that chorus out of your head. Bet you can't.

Despite its flaws, with The Raven that Refused to Sing, Steven Wilson has created an album which is a clear improvement over the two which precede it. His lyrics and singing, in particular, have matured to the point where he can give a convincing, emotional performance of any lyric deserving such a performance (like in the closing song). The fact that he has a genuine band around him instead of a collection of high profile session musicians helps immeasurably as well. This doesn't really feel like a solo album as much as a band album. In the end, The Raven might not be perfect, but there's enough high quality material on here for me to recommend it.

After the hype his album had received, and for my love of Porcupine Tree, I had to give in and get this album. Needless to say I was not disappointed. One thing I've always enjoyed about Steven Wilson with his work in Porcupine Tree was that they were never musically stagnant, that is to say they went through a number of periods or eras, starting off with the psychedelic leanings of Pink Floyd, but eventually progressing through periods of pop, alternative, and metal inspired music. This album keeps with this trend, where Wilson explores a more jazzy and symphonic sound. The biggest thing I noticed off the bat was the unmistakable classic prog sound and influence, especially King Crimson. That is to say the album is drenched in mellotron to lend it that more symphonic feel, but also has harder- edged guitar with some darker moments to give it a King Crimson feel. Nonetheless, the album is truly an original adventure for Wilson and company, with each and every member contributing his unique sound to the record.

The album opens on a high note with 'Luminol.' This is a rather diverse track, starting with the energetic opening filled with killer bass riffs and pounding drums. But this segues into a gentler, atmospheric section with some guitar, flute, and Steven's vocals. The following piano solo has a very jazzy and relaxing feel to it. The final few minutes is a crescendo of mellotron and infallible musicianship that yields a very symphonic and dramatic feel, something for which there is much of in this album.

Drive Home is another great song which I view in two main parts. The first few minutes is a very melodic section with piano and vocals from Steven. Again, the mellotron is great here, and provides a very symphonic and dramatic atmosphere. The latter half of the song is perhaps one of the best guitars solos I have ever heard. Goven certainly brought something special to the album, and this is proof. The solo ends the song on a very, tense and uneasy, yet inspirational note with his impeccably emotional playing.

The Holy Drinker is another rather diverse song with an overall darker mood. The opening is quite chaotic before settling down into a nice melody. There a plenty of metal riffs throughout similar to Porcupine tree, which contribute to the songs harder, darker edge. The saxophone and flute work is also noteworthy.

'The Pin Drop' may be the weakest song on the record, but may also be least derivative of classic prog, mainly taking on a more alternative sound Porcupine Tree are often known for.

'The Watcher' is another lengthy song filled with twists and turns. The opening section is serene with acoustic guitar, some clean electric guitar, mellotron, and Wilson's vocals. But of course, the tune picks up a more chaotic edge around four minutes in, filled with flute and sax wandering over a cool riff, before returning to the more stable style of the beginning, and ultimately ending in a dark dramatic fashion.

The final song couldn't be a more perfect closer to the album. The title track is simply a masterpiece, beautifully simple, and emotionally evocative. It is sad, yet encouraging. Everything is perfectly in place, from the gentle piano and vocals to the dramatic mellotron chords. It is best just sit back and let it paint a picture in your mind.

As I've mentioned, I am very impressed by this release. In my opinion this gives even In Absentia, Deadwing, and Anesthetize a run for their money. One would think after all of his genius in Porcupine Tree, Wison would have run out of ideas, but as evidenced he still has enough to create one of the most exciting and emotionally powerful albums of modern prog.

9/10

The Raven That Refused to Sing ― an album that I refused to listen for a long time. Actually I am not a Steven Wilson/Porcupine Tree (or other SW projects) guy, I mean Wilson is likely to be the most overrated musician in the prog world and I've been a little frustrated about this. Nevertheless, resistance is futile for some reasons, and I've decided to listen it for a time ago with very little expectations. However something really strange was happened: I've liked the album. Yes, Wilson finally did it, he really achieves a great album. Although the record generally sounds like a typical Wilson album, Marco Minnemann and Guthrie Govan bring an outstanding energy that makes the album different from other Wilson records. The heavy fusion beginning of the album, I mean the first part of the Luminol makes a great start, but I've to say the song also goes well all along. Drive home, the second song, is an incredible ballad that impress me so deeply. I'd like to say that I've never thought SW can compose such a ballad. The Holy Drinker and The Watchmaker are also great song, but particularly the last part of the The Holy Drinker, that is the part that contains the catchy lick and great orchestration, and the first part of the The Watchmaker, the part that makes me cry every time I listen, may be the on the top of the SW music. The Pin Drop and The Raven That Refused to Sing are a bit weaker songs than others. To sum up, this is really a good record, that is one of the best albums in the last years in the prog world: 8.5/10

A Masterpiece Of Modern Progressive Music

Steven Wilson put Porcupine Tree on what seemed like permanent hiatus in 2011 and many fans were upset at the prospect of Steven's diversion into the solo path he started with Insurgentes. That album and Grace For Drowning were stirling efforts, with Wilson honing his prog chops steadily and absorbing the influences gained from re-mastering some classic Crimson and Tull albums.

Then along comes The Raven That Refused To Sing (and other stories) brim full of the kind of confidence that critical success and fan worship brings. A settled band in place, Wilson reaches for the stars and delivers a masterpiece that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the classics of the genre. Every one of the six tracks on this album delivers, melding consumate musicianship with beautifully judged songwriting.

I'm not going to analyse each track because they are all a tour-de-force in their own way. Beggs, Minnemann, Holzman, Travis and especially Govan bring Wilson's artistry to life with ensemble playing that matches any Prog could muster since its inception. Truly a spellbinding experience all kept together by the master conductor, Wilson. If he keeps creating masterpieces like this Porcupine Tree will be just a pleasant memory, the hors d'oevres to a stellar career.

I'm astonished at some of the negativety directed towards this album, and Wilson himself. This is a genuine top class modern piece of progessive music setting the bar against which others must now be measured. Quite possibly the best progressive music album in the last 40 years. Yeah, it's that good!

Highly recommended. 10/10