An excellent review from Leo Trimming of Steve Hackett’s new album:

Wolflight refers to the hour before dawn, when much of the album was written, which Hackett felt was a special time in which “You’re in an altered state because you’re closer to the world of dreams”. There is certainly a dream like quality to much of the album, sometimes slipping into darker nightmare, and like many dreams the music is amorphous and difficult to define at times.

Hackett often travels the world and these experiences permeate Wolflight with musical influences and instruments drawn from places as diverse as Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Middle East, the Deep South and Australia. Alongside those more exotic aspects Hackett also adds to his musical palette with imaginative use of classical orchestral music. Nevertheless, Hackett ensures that this album is liberally embellished with his trademark guitar sounds. The diversity of the musical ideas brought to this work means that it is often unpredictable, can be quite bewildering at times, and is certainly never boring!

…

Steve Hackett loves to explore both musically and geographically, and he has also clearly found personal happiness, the experiences and emotions of which are so evident in this work.

Steve Hackett has never stood still in his work and has strived to explore new areas of music. Some of those efforts have not always fully worked or engaged his audience, but he has remained true to his principles of stretching himself. He has previously released albums of mainly progressive rock music, or acoustic music, or orchestral music and even blues music, but he has never so successfully fused elements of all those styles and more on one piece of work. After a period of revisiting old classics it is perhaps fitting that Wolflight underlines so clearly that Hackett will never live in the past.

The only track I have gotten to know well so far myself is “The Wheel’s Turning” (already available on iTunes) and it is magnificent.

Really looking forward to this album…