Steven Wilson: Grace For Drowning

Grace For Drowning

Best song: Sectarian

Worst song: why do I make myself do this? perhaps No Part Of Me

Overall grade: 6

“For me the golden period for music was the late sixties and early seventies, when the album became the primary means of artistic expression, when musicians liberated themselves from the 3 minute pop song format, and started to draw on jazz and classical music especially, combining it with the spirit of psychedelia to create “journeys in sound” I guess you could call them. So without being retro, my album is a kind of homage to that spirit.” –Steven Wilson, mid-2011

For his second solo outing, Steven Wilson decided to make a classic prog album and this is how many words he had to use to describe it without actually using the word ‘prog’.

‘Grace For Drowning’ was conceived as a massive double album. I don’t know how he has the time! As well as working on records with some of his bands, like Blackfield and Storm Corrosion, he was remastering stuff for Crimson, Caravan and Tull, he somehow managed to squeeze this project in too. It’s crazy, and the best part is, the quality doesn’t even suffer.

I was originally going to give this a 5 because I think I give out 6s too easily, but then I listened to it again and compared it to some other things I’ve given 6s too, and I definitely like it at least as much as Surrealistic Pillow and Bookends, so I can hardly deny giving it a 6. Plus I’m in a really great mood and I really don’t feel like being stingy with grades or superlatives or anything.

Essentially, this is two albums on two separate discs that both complement and contrast each other. The first one is more conventional and more melodic, while the second one is more sinister and adventurous in its songwriting. You can think of them as day and night, good and evil, childhood and adulthood, whatever. It’s definitely conceivable that somebody could really like one disc and strongly dislike the other, but I’ve always thought they work best as a pair.

The title track is a brief instrumental prelude, piano-based, quietly setting the scene for the album and leading into ‘Sectarian’, a contrast because it has so much going on. I can imagine this busy track being a big old mess in less experienced hands, but Wilson can pull it off fine. The Mellotron’s very prominent on this song, too, giving it a more old fashioned feel. It could almost be an outtake from some 1973-74 King Crimson.

The quieter tracks include ‘Deform to Form a Star’, an introspective vocal ballad that almost seems to have gospel influences, and ‘Postcard’, a very mainstream, very marketable breakup song. I don’t think it loses anything for being this, though. Immediately after it comes ‘Raider Prelude’ which is the darkest part of disc one, and serves as a bridge between the two discs as well as being a teaser for what will come later.

By the time the full song does come around, we’ve already had a couple of other ominous and dramatic songs in a similar vein, so it’s not too much of a shock. These are ‘Track 1’, which I believe is so named because it would be such an atypical opening track for any album; and ‘Index’, a creepy bass and electronic drum-fest with lyrics about a sociopath. It’s very deliberate, and then ‘Raider II’ makes things even more nightmarish because it’s more freeform and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m not sure I can even consider it a song in the traditional sense, more like a musical lab experiment. It’s highly ambitious, dissonant, and at times bordering on unpleasant, it has a wonderful epic climax but then a pointless ending, it has some awesome unpredictable time signatures but some sections of it are overlong, and all these things make it a huge, imperfect achievement.

After being all shaken up by this piece, the conclusion of ‘Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye’ brings me back down to earth slowly. It’s calm and unhurried and I’m big into the twin guitar solo in the middle of it, but I can’t decide if I like the ending or not. It’s either a clever way of making the transition from the world of this album to the real world as seamless as possible, or it’s pointlessly just there.

 If you get the deluxe edition, there’s a third disc with a bunch of other songs and also a work-in-progress version of ‘Raider II’, which is a great find from the point of view of someone like me who has no idea how one might go about writing a 23-minute song. Even to get a little part of the thought process along the way is really cool.

In conclusion: I don’t think this album is Wilson’s greatest work; it’s still very sprawling and a bit all over the place, but if he never makes something on this scale again, then it might well be the magnum opus that he’s remembered for in the future. That would make sense – it shows many different sides of his musical personality and displays his vision and ambition to the full.