Steven Wilson, The Harmony Codex (Virgin)

I don’t get invited to many parties these days, but when I did, I would occasionally be asked the old standby question “what kind of music do you like?”  Struggling for an answer beyond the glib – and in any case untrue – “I like all kinds,” I would reel off a grab-bag of genres including guitar rock, alternative rock, folk rock, free jazz and even (depending on how confident I was feeling) industrial.  But the genre I felt most comfortable expressing enthusiasm for was progressive rock, having developed a grudging respect for my brother’s Genesis albums in my early teens, followed by my own belated discoveries of Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator (in that order).

I’ve remained a huge fan of those groups – the Big Four of progressive rock, as I like to call them – to this day, but have rarely ventured beyond them in my explorations of the genre.  I dipped my toe in the fetid waters of Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull and Gentle Giant, but none of them gave me much reason to investigate further.  I was also aware that – notwithstanding that at least two of the Big Four have been active in recent years – I was dealing with an essentially historical genre, sadly lacking in contemporary relevance.  In seeking out modern-day equivalents of the Big Four, I gave the likes of Marillion short shrift.  It wasn’t until I saw Porcupine Tree in Vienna in 2007 that I found a group able to combine the elegance and grandeur of prog with a disquieting sense of urban alienation and unease.

Porcupine Tree folded a couple of years later, having delivered what I regard as their best album in The Incident.  But Steven Wilson’s solo albums were, at least initially, even better than anything released under the Porcupine Tree monicker.  The four-album run from Insurgentes (2008) to Hand Cannot Erase (2015) was miraculous in many ways, from the free jazz-influenced Grace for Drowning to the baroque storytelling of The Raven That Refused to Sing, culminating in one of the great London albums, Hand Cannot Erase, which I still think of as Wilson’s masterpiece.

Unfortunately, his career then took a nosedive with his next albums, To The Bone and The Future Bites.  Wilson, who’d always evinced a desire not to be pigeonholed as a progressive rock musician, here steered well clear of the genre with two records’ worth of slick art pop influenced by Abba, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush.  No doubt it was all very well crafted and (especially in the case of The Future Bites) self-referential, but it was also mannered and soulless.  And the question of why Wilson was choosing to make good pop when he could have been making great prog was never satisfactorily answered.

Which brings me to The Harmony Codex, the first Steven Wilson album since Hand Cannot Erase that hasn’t made me want to gnaw my own knuckles off.  In part the album represents a return to the alienated urban landscape of Hand Cannot Erase; there’s some kind of conceptual thread running through it, an Escherian imagining of staircases and office blocks that really only becomes clear in the deluxe edition with its accompanying story and artwork.  (I’ve been patting myself on the back for ordering this edition when it first went on sale, since it now fetches upwards of £300 on the secondary market.)

Musically, too, the album feels like a return to what Wilson does best.  Diverse in mood and tempo, its ten songs draw the listener in with their confident vocals, polished instrumentation and agile, skittering beats.  “Impossible Tightrope” is a ten-minute switchback ride that progresses from dense riffing and busy drums to squally sax (courtesy of regular Wilson collaborator Theo Travis) and a bonkers electric piano solo from Adam Holzman.  “The Harmony Codex” itself is a blissed-out analogue synth soundscape that magically evokes prime ’70s Tangerine Dream (and is even more sublime in the 17-minute extended version on the deluxe edition of the album).  “Rock Bottom” is a gorgeous Floydian ballad haunted by Ninet Tayeb’s star-crossed voice, while on the lengthy closing track “Staircase” Niko Tsonev’s soaring guitar solo gives way to thunderous bass and uplifting synth tones.

Wilson’s lyrics speak of lost moments, broken connections and troubling visions of things falling apart.  Cool and precise, yet with a hint of menace in their delivery, his vocals tell the dreamlike narrative that ties the songs together.  There’s a sly reference to three of 1978’s best albums – Peter Hammill’s The Future Now, Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside and Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds – in the lyric of “Time Is Running Out”, yet on the evidence of The Harmony Codex Steven Wilson is just getting started.