Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex (Digital Deluxe) (2023)

THE HARMONY CODEX - the seventh album by Steven Wilson - takes you on a trip. A genre-spanning collection that opens up like a musical puzzle box, it presents a series of endlessly beautiful vistas that roll out and shift in front of you. Arguably the best album Wilson has made during a career that’s spanned more than three decades both as a band leader and as a solo artist, it represents the apotheosis of a life spent fully absorbed in music.

"It seems I'm miles above the surface of the earth/ I can see across the whole of London and beyond," intones Rotem Wilson over the hypnotic electronic pulsing of "The Harmony Codex," the title track of her husband Steven Wilson's seventh solo album. It's an evocative, widescreen scene that gives the listener a sense of the scale that Wilson is trying to achieve, along with being a moment of meditative pause in a record characterised by stylistic left-turns and surprises. In the past 15 years, since launching a solo career parallel to his three-and-a-half decades fronting Porcupine Tree, Wilson has thematically conceived his albums: 2008's Insurgentes revisited the post-punk sounds of his teenage years; 2021's The Future Bites was shiny synth pop. Here he sounds untethered from any particular concept, resulting in his most eclectic and experimental offering to date. Opener "Inclination" sets out his stall, moving from fidgety, Warp Records-styled electronica (replete with anxious, percussive breaths) to a sudden break ushering in Wilson's aching vocal, echoing that of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis on their landmark 1986 album, The Colour Of Spring. Wilson's proggy past resurfaces in the skittering jazz rhythms of "Impossible Tightrope" and the dreamy, Pink Floyd-like "What Life Brings." But, elsewhere, he seems intent on pushing himself in new directions. If there's a sense of existential unease apparent in the Peter Gabriel-esque "Time Is Running Out" ("You had a panic attack midway through the flight"), there's also emotional balm on offer in "Rock Bottom"—a mutually reassuring duet, with Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb, that comes across like an even more desperate take on Gabriel and Kate Bush's raw and heartfelt 1986 hit "Don't Give Up". The Harmony Codex never stays in one place for long, though. The climax of "Beautiful Scarecrow" shares some of its pummelling, industrial DNA with Massive Attack's Mezzanine album, "Actual Brutal Facts" finds Wilson successfully dabbling in pitch-shifted rapping, and the 9:27 trip that is closer "Staircase" is a multi-movement summation of all that has gone before. Overall, the lasting impression is that after realising the grand design that is The Harmony Codex, Steven Wilson can now go anywhere.