Steven Wilson - "The Overview"
Incline yourself to space
Two songs.
That’s it; this album is effectively comprised of two songs:
“Objects Outlive Us”, with a playtime of 23:19; and
“The Overview”, with a playtime of 18:21.
I mean, it is Steven Wilson, one of the most iconic figures in Prog Rock for the last few decades. I’m really not totally surprised. If anything, this sort of approach is overdue for his solo work.
The neat thing to note about this is that if you go and look at the tracklist after reading the above, you’ll frown for a moment — “there are more than two tracks here,” you might say, “what are you talking about, weird music blogger man?”
There are a total of twelve tracks on the album: the two listed above kick the album off, but then each of those is broken out as a suite where each movement gets its own track, allowing you to play only the sections you like or mix the smaller segments into playlists.
I get it. Not everybody likes long songs. I think it’s a clever approach. It also makes the album’s total runtime close to an hour and a half; and queueing the album up to listen while walking, driving, or completing tasks means that you’re going to get to listen through it twice, back-to-back.
For the remainder of this discussion, I will be referring simply to the two main track titles, though; and when I refer to the ‘album’, I mean just those two tracks, not the whole set of twelve tracks (because, really, tracks 3-12 are just a bonus).
What I love most about The Overview is its scale and scope — the concept feels very timely and provides a vehicle for the sort of social commentary that Prog Rock acts going all the way back to Pink Floyd have excelled at. It’s all about perspective — the album focuses in on the vast difference in scope between our daily lives and the universe that surrounds us. “Objects Outlive Us” spends a lot of time using contrasting images which compare our menial daily grind and problems to the grand images of space; “The Overview” opens with a list of celestial objects sorted by their size in scientific notation and metric distances, starting with Megameters (a couple of Saturn’s Moons), moving through Terameters (which lists the Red Supergiant Betelgeuse), all the way to the Yottameter (which features galactic superclusters).
It closes with this, too. In fact, both songs repeat their opening at the end. For “Objects Outlive Us”, that consists of:
I incline myself to space
There was no ghost on the moor
No open window
No monkey's paw
There in the mist
You asked me, "Did you forget I exist?"
I said, "Yes
But you played too hard to get"
Now, given the celestial theme, the ‘mist’ in question there is likely a nebula, with the voice its personification. In this, we find a damning criticism of modern humanity which pairs well with the rest of the album — content to laze about, permanently distracted by the pursuit of our next hit of dopamine, not to mention short-sighted, self-absorbed, and very likely to bring about our own destruction sooner rather than later.
Alternatively, the voice is that of God, Himself. With this reading, the album gets a very firm flip — all of the criticism applied to Humanity throughout the album is equally applicable to God or whatever Divine forces might have power over our universe and our existence. After all, where have they been; where have they gone? Does God get bored? Are the flaws which Wilson so harshly criticizes inherited?
How can we be condemned for a lack of faith when all sense of the Divine has fled the world?
And the difference between those readings is staggering. It is, again, a matter of perspective.
Musically, The Overview is as ambitious and grandiose as any of Wilson’s projects. It’s gorgeous with wild swings in tempo and tone from one movement to the next. The only issue I have is that the vocal melodies get a bit repetitive within each movement (especially that the two-by-two rhythm of “Objects Outlive Us: The Cicerones/Ark”). It’s fine for a few lines, but it just goes on for too long.
And if not for that issue, this would likely be a Purple for me. This album is, otherwise, excellent. I do believe it is one of his best solo releases to-date.
Rating: Blue