Steven Wilson: The Raven That Refused To Sing

The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)

Best song: Take your pick. I think I’ll pick The Watchmaker

Worst song: why? why? why? ok, The Pin Drop

Overall grade: 7

Look, it’s the album that’s in my little icon!

Reviewing my very favourite albums is something of a terrifying prospect, because I know I’ll never be able to do them justice, and I feel that particularly strongly with this one. Today, it is August 6 2013 and I can categorically state that Steven Wilson’s third offering is, without doubt, the best album released this decade so far. I’m fully prepared to re-evaluate this on December 31, 2019, but considering we’re over a third of the way through and there’s been no real competition as of yet… I’d say Mr. Wilson is in with a fair chance of the prize.

Whereas on his first two albums Wilson went a bit crazy having been let loose alone in the studio and started trying out thousands of ideas, most of which worked in fairness, here he finally seems able to stick to one main idea and create a work that is incredibly cohesive, driven, refined and which contains approximately 0.01% filler. It cleverly blends classic symphonic sounds with modern inventiveness and in doing so, fills every possible definition of ‘progressive rock’.

Of course, when I say one main idea, I don’t mean that this is a concept album. (Although somewhere around my third listen I began to see it as based around the concept of winter and loneliness.) Instead, as the title suggests, each one of these songs has its own story to tell. You get to meet a new character every time and hear about their life and often death, usually in quite a twisted way. I guess you could say that this is to a rock opera what a book of short stories is to a novel.

Opener ‘Luminol’ is a clear stylistic throwback to the 70s. I’m not sure what a chemical that makes blood fluoresce has to do with a busker who’s treated as nothing more than part of the scenery, but there you go. It’s jazzy with a lot of different melodies, all of which are interesting, and a particularly brilliant instrumental passage in the first couple of minutes. It’s not heavy on the lyrics at all, in fact they feel more like a special effect like a solo or a fuzz pedal than the focus of the song.

‘Drive Home’ is all about the guitar solo; I believe Guthrie Gogan plays it and it’s fast becoming one of my favourites in studio recordings of music. Prior to the sheer awesomeness of that, the song is a classic ballad but one of Wilson’s absolute best. It really does feel like a late night journey home.

There’s a lot of texture on ‘The Holy Drinker’ that makes the previous two tracks seem sparse in comparison. If we’re sticking with my winter concept, the first two related to the cold and the snow and the outdoors, while this one is indoors in front of a raging fire. I also think of this as the most unique and original part of the album. And the musicians that play here are literally of the highest possible calibre, and hearing them play really makes this song a joy to listen to, although it can seem a bit overwhelming at first with all these players being of an equal standard. I love Adam Holzman’s organ in particular.

‘The Pin Drop’ seems to be the token single, even though it wasn’t officially a single. It’s an objectively “normal” length, has the most energy and the most obvious hooks. I actually think it’s an amazing song that goes through an incredible amount of changes for its length, but even so, if he made a whole album full of Pin Drops I’d consider it selling out.

But the scariest thing of all, scarier than any of these stories, is that even after these four masterpieces the album hasn’t properly hit its stride yet. It does so with the magnificent ‘The Watchmaker’, which contains four minutes of frail beauty which perfectly represent the aged man in the story and the meticulous arranging of tiny parts in his craft. And then that wonderful cascading guitar part comes in and we realise that maybe the watchmaker can feel emotion after all! But after a few more plot twists, the watchmaker dies in a blast of dissonance. It’s perfectly written to tell a story through music with as few words as possible.

Wilson’s voice is at its absolute best and most tender on the title track – in fact there are times when I can’t believe the song isn’t a true story about his own life. The only half-decent word for this is spellbinding in how its dark, wistful atmosphere washes around you, and by the time it reaches the ‘Sing to me, raven…’ part I’m crying. Not many songs have that effect on me. It’s a perfect contrast to the ambitious epic of the previous track and I quite honestly cannot find a fault with it.

I feel like this album is probably full of little tricks and subtleties that I haven’t discovered yet. I can’t wait for it to be twenty years’ time and to be hearing this album, by then an old favourite, and to suddenly sit up and say ‘Hey! I never noticed that before!’

Prog rock in the 70s didn’t really have one person that completely defined the whole movement. These days it does, and that person is Steven Wilson, and he has just released one of the classic albums of the future.