With the release of The Harmony Codex, it’s now official. Steven Wilson is a member of The Academy of the Overrated.
I’m not talking about him as technician. He is indisputably a technical wizard who can create amazing sonic experiences. Beyond his own work, he is well known as someone who remixes classic albums and creates the best audio soundscapes.
But as a musician and songwriter he is vastly overrated. Sure, he’s a great instrumentalist, just as he is a great technician and arranger. But after releasing two stinkers in a row—The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites—we must admit that his only two works of genius—The Raven That Refused to Sing and Hand Cannot Erase—are total outliers.
Everything else he has done, whether solo or in a group, has always struck me as abominably overrated. There’s something lacking in the vast majority of his work. Set aside his only two brilliant albums and his work as an audio consultant. Everything else is just pretty good, but yet consistently soulless and pretentious.
How then could he produce two brilliant albums? Well, a stopped clock can be correct twice a day. But a better analogy for Wilson would be a perpetual motion machine that finds a true groove only twice in its lifetime of operation.
His soullessness and pretentiousness is magnified to intolerable degrees on The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites. The latter album was pretty bad, but The Harmony Codex is even worse. Take the spoken word nonsense on the title track, which then reappears on “Staircase.” It’s devoid of any meaning except pretension. Hey Steven, actual brutal fact: you alone dreamt up this album, and really it’s boringly bad.
It’s hilarious to me how many people in their reviews give this new album the benefit of the doubt and profess faith in how much better it will sound after more listens. Hey people, that tactic didn’t pan out with The Future Bites, and it’s sure not gonna happen with this one.
There are no songs here. The only moments of promise are the “love it all” catharsis in “What Life Brings,” and the one minute of awesome bass playing around the half-way mark of “Staircase” (but that killer bass work only lasts for a single minute; instead of wisely building on it to an album crescendo, Wilson blows it and decides to end the disc with repetition of the sophomoric doggerel from “The Harmony Codex”).
The diminishing reappearance of Ninet Tayeb on this album also demonstrates that Wilson is secretly operating according to an invisible template. Despite his desire to be original, he just keeps on being an unoriginal version of Steven Wilson. (Even his trademark falsetto is getting old.)
But if he were to do another homage to classic prog, like Raven it would paradoxically become original (because paradoxically it takes real skill to pay truly noble tribute to one’s betters). Instead he gets stuck on dumb ideas for the sake of originality: “Guitars are boring. Let’s do everything with synths instead.”
The failed attempt here at a real prog instrumental (“Impossible Tightrope”) goes nowhere, despite Wilson’s attempt to walk the tightrope of pleasing his prog fans (but nonetheless finding that task impossible). This illustrates what is perhaps most galling: the fact that Wilson consistently self-sabotages his best self. Instead of working within a recognizable idiom, he tries too hard to be original. But face the music: Wilson hasn’t reinvented music; he has just ended up being soulless and pretentious again.
The actual brutal fact (I repeat the phrase, so that we now get to the plurality alluded to by the “Actual Brutal Facts” track) is this: The Harmony Codex is garbage that nobody will be listening to fifty years from now—unlike the masterpieces that Wilson regularly remixes, and that he has failed to learn from.
Sure, The Harmony Codex sounds really nice. And Wilson is a master of marketing and promotion. But there is no songwriting here, other than “What Life Brings,” which feels like Wilson included it for perverse reasons: i.e., to show he could write songs like he did on Hand Cannot Erase if he wanted to, but he has decided not to. But like the three pretentious periods gratuitously inserted into that album’s official title, Wilson sabotages his own creative potential.
The Harmony Codex is just an exemplary audio demo record: i.e., what the sales dude at the stereo store puts on to demonstrate how good this stereo and speakers sound. But don’t savvy shoppers bring their own disc to play anyway? Because the cool demo record is something completely different from your favorite album. The former demo makes a good audio impression, but the latter classic disc is what you are actually buying the stereo for: i.e., what achieves its true purpose, beyond the superficial wow-factor of novel synth sounds.
What if Wilson actually tried to make an album that sounded unmistakably inspired by Yes or King Crimson, but crafted and adorned with state-of-the-art 21st century audio tricks? It would be Nirvana.
Instead, we now have two shitty albums in a row. They do nothing but highlight the fact that alleged prog emperor Steven Wilson has nothing going on beneath all the vapid talk about how wonderful is his kingdom of sounds. What a waste.
