Steven Wilson has been one of the twenty-first century’s top music producers in both senses: an imaginative, dedicated sound sculptor with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of how to use any piece of technology to make sounds, and a superb songwriter, musician, and singer that beautifully blends skill, heart, experimentation, and accessibility. Whether solo, in one of his many side projects, or with Porcupiine Tree, he’s made a long series of exquisitely realized albums that are as attractive and accomplished as any in music.
For Requiem For a Village, however, Wilson tries something different: imperfection. Inspired by his native U.K.’s tradition of folk horror, particularly that found in the splendidly weird dark fantasies that served as children’s television in the seventies, the genre-agnostic auteur eschews his usual path to digital perfection for a more gnarled, crooked, and well-worn world through the forest. Guitars remain untuned, instruments never before played wander in, and Wilson’s friend Andy Partridge provides a libretto narrated by David Tennant. The quest for polish bends into a search for the grit beneath the fingernails, the grime under a log near a pond deep in the woods, and a spirit animal grinning at us from a hole in the ground. The ghosts in druidic monuments leave their stones and slip behind you on your bicycle seat as you head back home for lunch, then surf the internet with the sound off while everyone’s asleep in the house.
The famously drug-free Wilson simulates this acid fantasy with dry tones, earthy clarity, and a warm sonic wind blowing through the tracks. Unlike his previous record, the spectacular, lush, and astrophysical The Overview, Requiem For a Village stays grounded in the earth like a crop circle. Cleanly distorted guitars, expansive rhythms, and synthesizers that sound like dust had to be blown off them before they could be activated eschew anything that might make the songs shiny while still painting a coat of surreality. Though reveling in plush melody, “Murmurations” blends jangly acoustic guitar and cozy piano with electronic noises and a nascent dread. “On Chapel Slope” disguises acid folk in post rock drag, conjuring a spell that grows more creepy with every passing chant. The pretty, folk “A Basket of Bees” sounds lovely until you remember that its title object isn’t anything you’d want to hold for long. The title track blends snarling metal with airy progressive rock for a nostalgic hallucination the likes of which Ray Davies never dreamt.
As we get near the end, however, the fog starts to clear, and we see the forest for what it is: a green place teeming with life, a repository of memories of the earth’s iterations as we move toward infinity. Sunlight attempts to break through on the lovely “Great Green Map,” encouraging us to stay on the path even as thorns grow on each side of the road during “Wheel.” But on “The Old God is Buried,” the final track, Tenant reminds us that we live in the here and now – haunted by the past, perhaps, but not dominated by it. As with many Wilson records, darkness and light exist side by side, but the latter – often in the guise of Dickinson’s thing with feathers – always stands firm. That it does so on a record that, despite familiar melodic and instrumental signposts, doesn’t sound like anything Wilson has made before points a finger toward the future, hungry phantoms be damned.
