Album review: Steven Wilson – The Future Bites

If you want an insight into why The Future Bites sounds the way it does, look no further than the album’s fourth track, 12 THINGS I FORGOT, and the lyric, ‘I just sit in the corner complaining / Making out things were best in the eighties’. We can't attest to Steven Wilson’s status as a curmudgeon – he’s always seemed a jolly nice bloke to us – but he’s certainly made no secret here of his love for the music from the ‘Greed decade’.

Steven is far from gluttonous on The Future Bites, though. While the idea of this restless prog nomad embracing electronics might conjure ideas of nuclear bombast, the reality proves more restrained. Arrangements are slick but sparse, clinical canvases on which melodies bloom one after another, resulting in a mature strain of pop that suits Steven’s style but will – and already has – rubbed some fans the wrong way.

Highlights include KING GHOST and PERSONAL SHOPPER, the latter featuring self-confessed shopaholic Elton John, whose sober intonations of items like ‘deluxe edition box sets’ and ‘volcanic ash soap’ provide the bonkers centrepiece to an epic satire on consumerism. Steven’s own voice, meanwhile, gives him a suitably robotic presence throughout, whatever key he’s singing in.

There’s one notable drawback to The Future Bites having been delayed since last summer. In doing so, it arrives after Existential Reckoning, the latest album from Maynard James Keenan’s Puscifer. Both have a conceptual focus on identity and technology. Both share a similarly retro bent, too, right down to the fact that Steven’s second track, SIN, sounds like it's been plucked from the Puscifer record, male/female vocal interplay and all. Maynard and co. might have beaten Steven to the punch, undermining a little of The Future Bites’ USP, but there’s room for both, especially when Steven’s record is more forthcoming in its ambitions.

Mr Wilson has travelled all over the musical map, but appears to be more direct in wanting bigger results this time around. Is it better than what he’s done before as a result? Not always, but it’s the next blockbusting step from an artist who’s always done things on his own sonically strange terms.

Verdict: 3/5

For Fans Of: Porcupine Tree, Puscifer, Ulver

The Future Bites is released on January 29 via Caroline.

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