Epistrophe

March 18, 2025

Steven Wilson’s Overview

Steven Wilson’s newest album, The Overview, released in March, contains two lengthy pieces, “Objects Outlive Us” and the title track, spanning twenty-three and eighteen minutes, respectively. It marks a return to the progressive sound he abandoned after The Raven Who Refused to Sing (And Other Stories)), and it’s a necessary listen in this hurried and fomented world of the 21^st century. 

     Wilson’s album is based on what is called the “Overview Effect,” a cognitive shift apparently experienced by astronauts in space. The musician explained to Prog earlier this year that it’s the moment when they reach “the understanding, in a split second, of just how insignificant we are.” This idea of perspective, he said, is what the album is about and “something we can all do with an injection of.”   

     It’s been twelve years since Wilson embraced a prog sound, favoring shorter, self-contained tracks on albums like the recent Harmony Codex, The Future Bites and To the Bone, but he told Prog that he’s returned to it “because that’s what the form suggested.” It should please fans of Porcupine Tree and of the earliest of his solo albums. 

The Overview has been referred to by its creator as “cinema for the ears” and it’s difficult to argue with that. The sound spectrum runs the gamut of full progressive rock arrangements, electronics, spoken word and vocal and instrumental passages. Wilson is known for allowing his lyrics to be reshaped by his melodies so that their cadences and inflections bear little resemblance to how they appear on the printed page. Here, at times, his songwriting creates an almost scientifically emotionless stream as lyrics group into pairs of syllables or portions of verses float amid pauses, not unlike celestial bodies swimming in space. 

     The album features a lyric contribution by former XTC leader Andy Partridge on “Objects Outlive Us,” an examination of life on earth in relation to the rest of the cosmos. For the piece, Wilson told Prog, he wanted “these little everyday soap operas with black holes and nebulas exploding on the other side of the universe – the triviality of everyday life juxtaposed with these events we can barely get our heads around.” Partridge provided the soap operas, and the depiction, like most of “Objects Outlive Us,” is not a flattering portrait of humanity. Compared to “The Overview,” in which the magnitude of the cosmos is rendered in both scientific and poetic terms, the track’s criticisms of human conduct can even appear trivial, particularly in the movement titled ‘Infinity Measured in Moments.’

     After its examination of the impermanence of things, the album concludes with the meditative movement called ‘Permanence,’ a gorgeous piece for keyboards and soprano sax. If there’s any form of human or celestial hope on this release, it can be found here in its conclusion. The simplest and humblest of the forty-one minutes, it offers an invitation to reflect on the perspective we’ve just experienced about life in relation to a bigger picture. 

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