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Lapsed prog rocker goes shopping, hits the dancefloor. By Mark Blake. Steven Wilson ★★★★
The Future Bites TFB.COM/CAROLINE INTERNATIONAL. CD/DL/LP/MC/BR
WHAT A LONG strange trip it’s been for Steven Wilson. The Robert Fripp of ’90s prog stylists Porcupine Tree, his solo work since 2008 has seen him embracing pop, dance and electronica, and becoming all the more interesting for it. He’s the selfconfessed music geek from Hemel Hempstead, who sells out the Royal Albert Hall and puts on his headphones whenever XTC or Yes, among others, need their old works repurposed for a deluxe-edition box set.
Wilson’s sixth solo album explores social media overload and rampant consumerism. “Buy the shit we never knew we lacked,” as he suggests on Personal Shopper – and this includes those deluxe-edition box sets. It’s all very meta but presented as social commentary rather than finger-wagging critique. Wilson knows he’s as guilty as the rest of us.
The message is also sold with some of his best songs yet. Wilson’s innate understanding, as a producer, of what makes, say, Skylarking or Fragile tick, feeds into his own writing. The downside is he’s such a musical savant, his influences can appear too obvious, as on parts of his last solo release, 2017’s To The Bone, and certainly further back.
The Future Bites wears its inspirations lightly, though. Its nine songs are stripped of extraneous fat, with odd bursts of Prince and Trevor Horn-produced Yes and ZTT hits alongside this century’s Tame Impala and Wilson’s co-producer David Kosten’s ambient music project Faultline. The tunes shimmer and the contrast on the melodies is turned up high, while the imaginative twists and turns of Self, King Ghost and Eminent Sleaze – the last is heavyfooted funk driven by soaring female vocals – are uniquely Wilson’s.
He’s an understated singer, but this subtlety suits both 12 Things I Forgot’s cheerful pop and Man Of The People, where his melancholy voice floats – disembodied and Auto-Tuned – through a galaxy of electronic bleeps and washes, like 10cc’s I’m Not In Love reimagined by bots. Wilson inhabits these songs completely, because he’s so believable as its subject: a tech-head surrounded by stuff and obsessively filling his Amazon basket with more. The Future Bites drives its point home on Personal Shopper, where Wilson pauses the thumping Moroder-ish backing track to let special guest and renowned shop-aholic Elton John recite a wish list of items: “Teeth whitener, volcanic ash soap, smart watch…”
The futurebites.com website stays in character, detailing limited-edition merchandise, like a £200 branded dot generator (a hole punch by any other name) and, inevitably, a £75 box set. Pop eating itself, and coming back for seconds. Wilson runs the risk of being a smart-arse, but the music saves him. The Future Bites is a great grown-up pop record – knowing and self-aware, but never too much for its own good.