Review by Shawn Perry
Up until recently, Steven Wilson hadn’t been to Los Angeles on his own in a long time. “Seven years,” he remarked at one point during his two-set performance at the Wiltern.
Things can change a lot in seven years. In Wilson’s case, that meant pulling back on his pop music experiments and coming back to his unique brand of exquisitely well-arranged and produced prog. His 2025 solo release, The Overview is a return to form to a certain degree. At the same time, it pushes the bounds of techno that transcend the “size beyond one yottameter.”
In a concert setting, The Overview becomes a visually and sonically charged “super cluster complex” to bait the senses. For a mixed Wiltern audience of young and old, predominantly male, it was immersive, hard-edged at one turn, subtle and comforting at the other. Wilson and his band — guitarist Randy McStine, keyboardist Adam Holzman, bassist Nick Beggs, and drummer Craig Blundell — basked largely in the shadows as characters, collages, and constellations of various shapes and sizes danced and dangled on the screen overhead.
For the first half of the piece, entitled “Objects Outlive Us,” Wilson stood at centerstage, in his usual barefooted, t-shirt and jeans attire, his voice ricocheting against the walls during the surreal sound montage of “No Monkey’s Paw” before the players unite in harmony on “The Buddha of the Modern Age,” with lyrics that are anything but harmonious. It all flows into the night’s first foot tapper, “Objects: Meanwhile.”
Wilson had an arsenal of guitars and keyboards within reach and mainly stuck to the one side of the stage, though he later jokingly quipped the two Americans — McStine and Holzman — at stage left charged a “tariff,” which is why he spent more time at stage right. Each player, in his own right, was essential to make it all come together.
McStine, who also toured with Porcupine Tree and plays on The Overview, has proven to be the perfect foil for Wilson’s music, nailing the guitar breaks with his own panache, equally adept at the background vocals and harmonies, and providing sound design and effects. Holzman’s role in Steven Wilson’s solo career has been crucial since 2013, his piano and synth work especially part of the fabric. For a guy who once played with Miles Davis, he stayed in his lane for the most, occasionally engaging with McStine on solos. Maybe it’s their way of making up for the “tariffs”.
Of course, the engine room is as sturdy and shiny as they come. Beggs’ incalculable bass and Chapman stick work is the gooey glue that keeps everything cocked and loaded, while Blundell drove the beat with tight precision and a slight hint of nuance to send shivers through the vains of every wannabe drummer in the theater’s first four sections. Having also appeared on The Overview, it’s difficult to imagine any other drummer pulling it off as effectively.
The instrumental “Cosmic Sons Of Toil” was one of the night’s showcase moments of how the musicians meshed and maneuvered through the many shades of Steven Wilson’s soundscapes. Then things turned interdimensional when a full-on techno subterfuge rose up, the lights went down, and a computerized recording of Wilson’s wife Rotem reading measurements of the largest structural elements of the observable universe, which appeared on the screen as calculations giving way to angelic bodies of cosmic color and galactic wonderment.
The players once again coalesced, this time for “A Beautiful Infinity,” perhaps the most radiant and eloquent track on The Overview. Simple yet powerful, the song flowered in Pink Floyd perfection while the audience sat, entranced, enraptured, and seized by the execution and existential mystery of the piece. At its conclusion, the standing ovation washed over Wilson and company like an effusive christening, once and all confirming that the artist’s return was well worth the wait. After a short intermission, the second half of the program loosened up with an array of selections from Wilson’ solo catalog. There were huge servings pulled from two particular albums — 2015’s Hand. Cannot. Erase. and 2023’s The Harmony Codex — for possible reasons of economy and accessibility. They certainly bring the best of Wilson’s prog and pop sensibilities together, and the former is his most successful in the States.
They cut through a spicy slice of Porcupine Tree’s “Dislocated Day” before landing on the ballad “Pariah,” featuring a duet between Wilson and the filmed segment of the video with Ninet Tayeb. The main set ended on a somber note with “Harmony Korine,” the first single from the singer’s solo debut album, Insurgentes, followed by the instrumental, “Vermillioncore.”
Before starting the two-song encore, Wilson asked the audience to stand up and explained that he wasn’t going to be playing what most bands play for the encore because: “We have no hit singles,” as he said, adding that they wouldn’t be playing “Smoke On The Water” or “Freebird.”
It started with “Ancestral,” then the familiar piano notes announced, “The Raven That Refused To Sing.” The crowd sat mesmerized by the video and the stark notes that filled in the gaps as the song built into a wall of sound. Wilson’s fading vocal closed out the song and the night. As the audience made their way out, you got the feeling that Steven Wilson would be back much sooner than the previous seven-year gap with a whole new batch of sights and sounds to dazzle the senses.
