Some of my initial thoughts on Steven Wilson’s five-star masterpiece, Hand. Cannot. Erase.:

The title track, Hand Cannot Erase, which is already available, explores the theme of the transcendence of love. Significantly, it is a hopeful affirmation, albeit a fragile one, offered amidst the brokenness unflinchingly explored by the album’s other songs.

Perfect Life, for example, depicts the main character’s ecstatic discovery, at the age of 13, of a sister she never knew. They become best friends, but their “perfect life” together lasts only for six months.

The narrative relates how their family life is again shattered. Once more, brokenness eclipses the moments of bliss: “For a few months everything about our lives was perfect. It was only us, we were inseparable. Later that year my parents separated and my sister was rehoused with a family in Dollis Hill. For a month I wanted to die and missed her every day.”

Wilson’s album also includes a lengthy track, Ancestral, that to my mind offers the most frightening sonic depiction ever rendered of the weight of original sin, of the weight of the guilty dragging down the innocent. Remarkably, Wilson’s song cycle ends by presenting the main character’s death in the luminous context of a celestial boys’ choir breaking though a rainstorm. There is a return to the happy sounds of innocent children playing in a playground, sounds first heard at the beginning of the album.