There are some artists in the world of music who always ensure that their works give the listeners a one-of-a-kind experience, and Steven Wilson is one of them. So we urge all progressive music lovers to get ready to enjoy a ride to the very depths of the sonic wilderness by tuning in to the latest full-length studio album by Steven Wilson, The Overview. Joining forces with him in this album is a wide range of excellent musicians, including Adam Holzman on the keys, Randy McStine and Niko Tsonev on guitars, Craig Blundell and Russel Holzman on drums, Theo Travis on flute and saxophone, and finally, his better half Rotem Wilson and Willow Beggs on vocals. Besides the line-up of musicians and vocalists, the legend Andy Partridge from XTC has also contributed to some parts of the lyrics in the album.
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The latest studio album by Steven Wilson, The Overview, is a two-track conceptual progressive album that runs for a duration of about forty-two minutes, and it takes the listeners on a musical journey to the darkness of outer space from where the very sight of the planet Earth causes a cognitive shift that some astronauts experience, a popular term for which is the Overview Effect. This effect is precisely a phenomenon where seeing the Earth from space triggers a profound sense of how fragile it is and the place of humanity in the cosmos as the planet gets smaller and smaller with distances involving billions of years. This is the root concept of the album, which is what it talks about in this two-track segregation.
Objects Outlive Us
The first track of the album, Objects Outlive Us, looks deeper into and portrays the very intricacies of human life on Earth, where Steven Wilson paints a picture of modern humanity through the lyrics where he sheds light on our loss of ambition, wisdom, and perspective in favour of shallow distractions and self-destruction. Moving on, the song draws a line of difference between tiny, personal experiences of humans on Earth and the massive cosmic events, thereby playing along the lines of the idea that human beings worry about fleeting things while they happen to ignore the larger realities completely.
As the track goes on, a post-apocalyptic tale is narrated in the form of a repetitive chant from the perspective of a few survivors who warned the inhabitants of the Earth about its upcoming destruction and escaped the phenomenon by possibly making it out to space and are at present looking back in regret, thus delving deep into the fact of humanity’s insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe. Besides the conceptual intricacies of this track, musically, it is also very progressive and organic in terms of the characteristics of the instrumentation and overall production.
The Overview
The second track of the album, The Overview, is definitely going to remind you of a specific song from a particular band, and that is On The Run by Pink Floyd from their album The Dark Side of the Moon. But the fun part is that even though the influence is spot on, it sounds so fresh, new, and modern that you will instantly feel a rising excitement inside as you curiously look forward to what’s coming.
As this loop forms the basic sketch of this track, we get to hear a commentary on the measurement of the universe as it keeps scaling up from moons and stars right up to galaxies and superclusters, perhaps being spoken from the perspective of one of such survivors in the first track, who is looking at Earth from space while traveling and gradually getting lost into the vast expanse of the universe in every step.
Steven Wilson further expands this journey by emphasizing personal reflection in such a situation, where the conclusion is that perspective can change everything. As this track reaches its end, the music gradually happens to come down to a state of silence but at a very slow speed, perhaps depicting the cold emptiness of space or, instead, a calming sense of acceptance that everything eventually disappears and nothing truly lasts forever because time and the universe keep on moving and never stop.
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So, go ahead and check out The Overview by Steven Wilson. You can listen to the full album here:
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