THE OVERVIEW

Listening to The Overview leaves me genuinely sad, a kind of hollow melancholy that feels vaguely shameful, like mourning a friend who's still alive but irrevocably changed. Steven Wilson, whose genius I'd readily testify to under oath, whose Fear of a Blank Planet isn't just an album but a personal favorite, and which I consider the stellar point of my generation catalogue, simply doesn't have another masterpiece of that magnitude left within him. I resist typing this admission, partly because it sounds defeatist, mostly because it hurts.

Wilson's newest creation, tragically, resembles something like a weary b-side from The Sky Moves Sideways, yet systematically diminished in every conceivable metric: less vision, fewer epiphanies, and, frustratingly, none of the self-awareness needed to prune away the fluffy excess (prunning that dramatically improved the remixed version of The Sky Moves Sideways over the original release). This isn't just padding; it's active disregard for the listener's precious minutes. Wilson commits what I'd argue is one of the gravest musical sins possible: he squanders the listener's time without apology or payoff.

This album, such as it is, unravels into two sprawling, disjointed suites. Each track spirals aimlessly, crowded with half-hearted narrations and transitions that feel less like purposeful bridges and more like artistic procrastination. There's no hook, no moment that lodges itself in memory. Perhaps Wilson aimed deliberately for a simulation of drifting in outer space as the most existentially tedious experience imaginable. If so, full marks.

One might fairly compare The Overview with Pink Floyd's tragically disappointing The Endless River, an album haunted by its own emptiness, an artifact that aches with opportunities missed rather than captured. Wilson, on his podcast, once admitted a loss of enthusiasm for contemporary music since around 2000, a statement which suddenly, painfully, crystallizes my disappointment. Had he ventured outside his increasingly insular creative orbit, perhaps absorbing recent masterpieces: HMLTD's kaleidoscopic and audacious The Worm, Wilderun's expansive Epigone, Devin Townsend's deliriously inventive Empath, Drifting Sun's tenderly ambitious Forsaken Innocence, or Between the Buried and Me's disciplined chaos of Automata II; perhaps Wilson's music today wouldn't feel so trapped within its own echo chamber.

After Dominic Sanderson's latest predictable, paint-by-numbers prog album shattered any optimism I held for a torch-passing moment, my fragile hope now rests entirely upon AVKRVST. They alone seem poised to fill that deep, echoing void Porcupine Tree left behind.

Writing this feels miserably like penning a eulogy I never wanted to deliver.

I'm going to go cry now.

Goodbye.

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