Review: Steven Wilson – The Harmony Codex (2023)

The Harmony Codex is Steven Wilson’s seventh solo album.

Usually Wilson’s solo albums have some kind of musical theme. It’s as if he’s building a whole album around a particular genre, varying it in his own style. Insurgentes was Wilson’s take on post-punk, The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) flirted with retroprog, To The Bone paid homage to 80s art pop and The Future Bites focused on electronic and synthpop.

There is no such common thread with The Harmony Codex, which seems to bring together all of Wilson’s different influences. Wilson said before the release of the album that this time he did not set himself any restrictions in terms of musical direction. This impression was reinforced by the lack of direction of the ’singles’ released before the album. It was beginning to look like it was going to be a sort of The Best Of Steven Wilson compilation. With the difference that the songs would be brand new, of course.

But before we get to the music itself, a quick look at who the album was made with and how. The Harmony Codex was made during the corona pandemic, so it was entirely a remote collaboration as Wilson carved together a whole from bits and pieces sent in from musicians scattered around the world in his home studio.

There is no fixed band playing on the album, but each song is performed by a varying number of musicians. They include Craig Blundell (drums), Adam Holzman (keyboards), Nick Beggs (Chapman Stick), Ben Coleman (violin), David Kollar (guitar), David Kosten, Ninet Tayeb (vocals), Pat Mastelotto (drums), Nate Navarro (bass), Theo Travis (winds) and Niko Tsonev (guitar) from Wilson’s previous projects. New key faces on the album include Jack Dangers (lead vocals, programming), Sam Fogarino (drums), Nils Petter Molvær (trumpet), Guy Pratt (bass) and Nate Wood (drums). An interesting and talented bunch!

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The album opens with the seven-minute ”Inclination” which starts with a lovely mystical sound of Asian-esque wind instruments. As the sharp electronic rhythms kick in, the atmosphere becomes quite cinematic, especially when Norwegian nu-jazz specialist Nils Petter Molvaer’s signature trumpet is added. It’s a pretty impressive soundscape. At the three-minute mark, the music fades into silence and, after a surprisingly long art pause, restarts with Wilson’s vocals floating almost alone in the soundscape. An interesting, snappy electronic rhythm emerges in the background, but unfortunately it is soon joined by a more generic electronica beat. The second half of the song is duller than the interesting intro, but David Kollar’s dissonant electric guitar playing raises the stakes a little.

”Inclination” doesn’t quite work for me, but it’s a very interesting attempt to do some avant-garde electronica with a hint of jazz. I have to admit that ”Inclination” doesn’t support the theory I had outlined at the beginning about a best-of album that recycles different aspects of Wilson. ”Inclination” feels like the beginning of something new. But let’s listen further.

After the bold ”Inclination”, the second song takes a much more familiar path. ”What Life Brings” is a semi-acoustic nostalgic melancholic pop song of the kind Wilson has plenty of in his catalogue. This could be taken from the early 2000s Blackfield albums Wilson churned out with Israeli pop couple Aviv Geffen. The redeeming features of this rather unremarkable track are some really classy electric guitar playing (Wilson’s apparently only electric guitar solo on the whole album), a successful vocal melody and Wilson’s fine vocal performance. It seems that one of the most inspiring things for Wilson in music at the moment is to evolve as a singer. Progress has been made technically, but Wilson is still not particularly interesting as a vocalist and I don’t think he ever will be. Let me say straight away that I have never had anything against Wilson’s singing and still don’t. A marginal improvement in technique just doesn’t change things much one way or the other.

The third track ”Economies Of Scale” is a typical Wilson ballad, this time dressed up in full electronic instrumentation. In terms of its execution, the song could well have fitted into Wilson’s previous album The Future Bites. The vocal melody, which has been heard a million times, could have come from almost any of Wilson’s previous albums. As a whole, ’Economies Of Scale’s’ electronic clang and Wilson’s wailing vocals unfortunately create an image of poor-man’s Thom York. The best thing about this laptop tune is the chorus which, production-wise, is really impressively constructed. Wilson’s multi-tracked vocals are layered into a very interesting and powerful stereo image. There’s not much substance to ’Economies of Scale’, but the handsome production saves a lot.

The fourth track ”Impossible Tightrope” takes the album in a different direction again. So at this point it’s already becoming clear that there really is no clear line on the album, but rather Wilson seems to be throwing stuff at the walls as if to see what will stick.

Wilson himself has described Impossible Tightrope as ”a hybrid of progressive rock, spiritual jazz and electronica”. I don’t hear the organic, shimmering mysticism of spiritual jazz in Wilson’s song, but instead it reminds me more of Gong’s spacerock-flavoured jazz-rock and especially of the legendary song ’Master Builder’ from the album You. Whereas Gong’s music was full of energetic anarchy and dangerous incidents, Wilson’s clinical production steers the mind in the direction of Gong’s imitators Ozric Tentacles. The end result is relatively entertaining, but rather workmanlike.

Some internet commentator wrote that the backing tracks of ”Impossible Tightrope” sound like a backing tape that comes with some guitar magazine, meant to be played over guitar solos. A bit harsh, but there is a grain of truth in the statement. The effect is perhaps caused by the rather dull, stagnant bassline, over which drummer Nate Wood thunders in complex rhythms (the ”impossible tightrope”?). There’s still something a bit stiff about the rhythm track. The groove is missing. ”Impossible Tightrope” is saved by its several lively solo parts. Adam Holzman’s characteristic rattling electric piano solo is probably the song’s most delicious moment.

Wilson has said that ”Impossible Tightrope” was built around his stripped-down demo on which other musicians sent in free-form suggestions of their own contributions. From these suggestions, Wilson then shaped the final song like a sculptor. This is a valid and often used way of working today, but I think it is not the best way to work on music that is related to jazz. It’s hard to believe that Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz classics would have been as great as they are without the opportunity for real interaction between the musicians. Indeed, ”Impossible Tightrope” is probably the song on The Harmony Codex that suffers the most from a production method dictated by the corona pandemics. I believe the song has the potential to come alive in a whole new way if it is played live in due course.

All in all, ”Impossible Tightrope” lasts almost 11 minutes and remains a collection of delicious individual moments, but the whole is not particularly inspiring and the song even feels a little overlong. ”Impossible Tightrope” clearly tries to combine the progejazz epics of Raven and HCE with the electronica of The Future Bites, the idea is good, but the whole is not entirely successful. But I wouldn’t mind if Wilson tried the concept again sometime.

The fourth track ”Rock Bottom” is a duet with Ninet Tayeb and stylistically the most conventional pop/rock anthem on the album alongside ”What Life Brings”. The song is actually Tayeb’s composition on which Wilson built the final arrangement. Tayeb sings her parts in a more husky style than usual. In the beginning Tayeb sings so low that when Wilson’s vocals finally come in he sings higher. Well, we do hear Tayeb’s higher stretches later on. Personally, I’m not a big fan of Tayeb’s singing style, but I certainly won’t deny her skill. Towards the end, we hear a David Gilmour-esque electric guitar solo from Niko Tsonev. ”Rock Bottom” is not a bad song, but of all the songs, it seems to fit into the confused whole the least well.

The fifth song ”Beatiful Scarecrow” raises the bar nicely. In a song that starts off moody and mournful, Wilson sings mocking lyrics about a treacherous old friend or business partner. The song grows nicely and unobtrusively, led by lush electronic percussion and tinkling synthesizers and strings, into a stately electronic thunderclap amidst the quiet wailing of Travis’ Armenian woodwind duduk. At the end, the racket subsides and the vocals return once more with strings playing in the background. A great song.

The title track ”The Harmony Codex” is the second longest on the album at almost ten minutes. It is also the album’s most minimalist offering and perhaps most obviously something completely new to Wilson’s repertoire.

Wilson now seems to draw inspiration from the minimalism of Philip Glass, or perhaps even more clearly from the post-minimalism of Max Richter. The piece is built on simple, bell-like synthesizer sounds that seem to endlessly circle around each other. Appropriately, the sound has a slightly carousel-like quality to it. Towards the end, strings join in.

While Glass’s minimalism is often quite imposing and his choice of sounds has an edginess to it, Wilson’s take on the subject is more toothless, and when combined with the text spoken in a flat voice by his wife Rotem Wilson, the sound is reminiscent of some pseudo-spiritual self-help recordings. The lyrics of Porcupine Tree’s ”Sound Of Muzak” also come to mind. I don’t know if 56 year old Wilson is a millionaire and twice the age of his target audience, but ”The Harmony Codex” is eerily close to what that song describes as ”elevator music Prozac” with the soul squeezed out and all the edges smoothed out.

Still, although ”The Harmony Codex” doesn’t quite convince me, it is in some interesting way a quite hypnotic experience. At least at times. Perhaps it is a work that requires just the right frame of mind to work. The song’s long duration is a bit of a double issue; on the one hand I understand that its hypnotic effect would be impossible to achieve without sufficient repetition, but on the other hand the song feels overlong and stops the momentum of the album for too long.

After ”The Harmony Codex”, ”Time Is Running Out” returns the album to more conventional pop. ”Time Is Running Out” is a rather uneventful electronic pop song, with the most interesting aspect being the strange, heavily effected, low-pitched chanting in the background in the middle of the song. I also like Tsonev’s short electric guitar solo with its softly lilting sound.

With a modern drum beat and a very low pulsating synthetic bass creating a nice groove, ”Actual Brutal Facts” sounds like a Mezzanine-era Massive Attack cover of Wilson’s song ”Index” (from the album Grace For Drowning). Wilson mostly sings the lyrics in a low voice. Or maybe we should talk about rapping?

Like ”Time Is Running Out”, this song also features strange low human voices that sometimes sound interestingly like coughing or twitching laughter. Kollar’s heavily effected electric guitar buzzes like an angry swarm of wasps.

”Actual Brutal Facts” is the song where Wilson’s electronica influences meet perhaps most naturally with his rock background. It’s a very successful combination and for me, the song is perhaps the album’s brightest highlight. I wouldn’t mind an album that built a coherent whole around this style of music.

The final track ”Staicase” neatly closes the circle as it returns to the avant-garde electronica feel of the first track, adding a slightly more muscular prog-band twist brought by the virtually assembled Beggs/ Blundell/ Holzman/ Tsonev quartet. All former Wilson touring band musicians. The song also bears some kinship to the title track, with a twisting synthesizer pattern playing with a carnival-like tense sound.

Blundell’s drums drive the song along deliciously and Beggs’ Chapman Stick, with its strange synthetic sound, sounds really good. Beggs even plays a little bass solo towards the end. Wilson’s rhythmically sung chorus is impressive and the vocal performance is varied. There is also some successful ahhh-aah vocalisation.

The return of Rotem Wilson’s voice at the very end, recycling the lyrics of the title track, slightly dampens the atmosphere of what has been a great song so far, but at least Holzman’s synthesizer, which is floating around in the background, sounds great. The song slowly fades away with the haze of the synthesizers. It’s a pity that the ending of an otherwise excellent song falls into an anticlimax.

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A few words about the production of The Harmony Codex which is of course again Wilson’s own work. Wilson sometimes gets a little too much praise for his sounds, but even if I don’t get excited about all the electronic rhythms on the album, from a purely sonic point of view The Harmony Codex is an impressive piece of work. It is probably Wilson’s best sounding album to date. The album sounds full and satisfyingly lush, but never sinks into the turbocharged murkiness that is so common these days. Wilson cleverly manages not to cram every corner of the soundstage full of stuff and in fact there are plenty of very airy and low-key sections that act as a nice contrast to the more intense moments. Wilson knew to do away with excessive compression several albums ago and The Harmony Codex also offers enough dynamics. On the negative side, Wilson’s pursuit of perfection to a certain extent is overdone; all the edges of the sounds have been polished away and there is no very bold exploration to be heard.

Well now that all the songs have been played through it’s time to see if it’s Best Of Steven Wilson or something else entirely. The fragmented nature of the album and the wide range of styles suggests this, but even if some of the songs sound like a recycled version of something that’s been heard too many times, the album offers enough new insight. Or at least a clarification of vision. Where Wilson’s influences have often been all too obvious, it seems that on The Harmony Codex they blend more smoothly into Wilson’s own music. So let’s say that The Harmony Codex is a best-of, but a best-of with fresh and surprising bonus tracks!

However, at 64 minutes, The Harmony Codex is too long. Wilson’s ancient pop/rock ”What Life Brings” and especially ”Rock Bottom” could have been thrown overboard and I wouldn’t have missed the unremarkable ”Time Is Running Out”. The 52-minute album that resulted from these deletions would have been at least a little more coherent and not so much a ”compilation album”.

Despite its excessive duration, I must admit that The Harmony Codex surprised me positively. After the incoherent To The Bone and the one-dimensional The Future Bites, Wilson seemed to be in an artistic slump, but The Harmony Codex is a successful remedy.

The Future Bites, which was almost entirely electronic, didn’t excite me or, as I understand it, many of Wilson’s followers, and it didn’t seem to bring in many new fans, so The Harmony Codex seems to be deliberately taking one step forward and two steps backwards. Although, of course, Wilson would never admit it. Wilson isn’t a particularly interesting or bold electronic musician, but The Harmony Codex’s style of combining modern electronica with more diverse real instruments seems like much more fertile ground to head for.

With The Harmony Codex, I again give myself permission to again look forward with interest to Wilson’s next album.

Best tracks: ”Inclination”, ”Beautiful Scarecrow”, ”Actual Brutal Facts”, ”Staircase”

The Harmony Codex has also been released as a ”deluxe edition” containing a generous number of bonus songs, alternative mixes and an audio version of short story ”The Harmony Codex” originally published in Wilson’s biography.

Author: JANNE YLIRUUSI:

Tracks:

Inclination 7:16
What Life Brings 3:39
Economies of Scale 4:18
Impossible Tightrope 10:44
Rock Bottom 4:24
Beautiful Scarecrow 5:21
The Harmony Codex 9:50
Time Is Running Out 3:58
Actual Brutal Facts 5:06
Staircase 9:26

Muusikot:

Steven Wilson: vocals (1-6, 8-10), acoustic guitar (2-4, 8), ARP 2600 (1, 4, 7), audio feedback (9), bass guitar (3, 4, 7, 8, 10), celesta (8), Cobalt 8 synthesizer (4, 5, 7, 10), electric guitars (2, 4-6, 8, 9), electric piano (9), harp (tracks 4, 5), Hammond organ (2, 4, 10), horn (10). Mellotron (9), Moog Arpeggiator (10), Moog Sub 37 synthesizer (2, 4-9), percussion (2, 6), piano, programming (1, 3, 4, 6, 8-10), Prophet 6 synthesizer (5, 7, 8), Rhodes piano (4), Solina Strings (2, 4, 6, 8-10), strings (3-7, 10), voices (3)

Adam Holzman: Rhodes piano (1, 4, 7), piano (9), DFAM loops (10), modular synthesizer (1, 3, 6), Moog synthesizer solo (10), Wurlitzer organ (5) Ben Coleman: violin (4) Craig Blundell: drums (2, 5, 6, 10), hi-hat (9), percussion (6, 9) David Kollar: solo guitar (1, 9), ambient guitar (4) David Kosten: programming (1, 10) Guy Pratt: bass guitar (2) Jack Dangers: electronic beats (6), programming (9). Jason Cooper: tom drums (6) Lee Harris: psychedelic guitar (4) Nate Wood: drums (4) Nick Beggs: chapman stick (6, 10) Niko Tsonev: guitars (1, 4, 10), solo guitar (5, 8, 10) Nate Navarro: untaped bass (1), bass guitar (9) Nils Petter Molvaer: trumpet (1) Ninet Tayeb: vocals (5), guitars (5), backing vocals (1, 2) Pat Mastelotto: drums (1), percussion (1) Rotem Wilson: vocals (7, 10) Samuel Fogarino: drums (10) Theo Travis: flute (1), saxophone (4), duduk (6)