I’m very happy with the new record and it can undoubtedly stand proudly in line with the rest of the discography! That’s an accomplishment for sure.
However I wouldn’t know where to rank it just yet in the PT/SW album discography. All I know is I’ve always considered SW a musical genius, where everything he touches turns to gold. This changed with The Future Bites. I still quite like it, but to me it’s easily his weakest album.
With PT I love the atmosphere, riffage and good pop songwriting. The SW albums I like equal but Raven, HCE and to a lesser extent To The Bone had incredible highs with Guthrie Govan’s (and later a few others’) beautiful solos. That’s an element that definitely sets the solo albums apart from PT. I also adore SW’s guitar solos but the solo albums have a special element to it with the ‘sky is the limit’ aspect to the guitar and synth solos. I know that doesn’t really apply to Insurgentes and GfD, but those had respectively a post-punk influence and a jazz-fusion element that made them unique.
PT and SW solo, however not the same, always had that shooting for the stars mentality, or the ‘epic’ ambitions if you will. The Future Bites is daring in its straightforward and electronic approach, but it definitely misses the climaxes SW can do so well. The album had me feared that SW simply wasn’t interested anymore in that type of musical vocabulary.
Closure / Continuation has taken those fears away from me. It’s the type of music I know and love from Wilson. Still, I wouldn’t say it’s a safe sounding album. ‘Harridan’ is definitely a track that needed a lot of spins. In fact, it has been growing on me since it got released as a single. It’s definitely a Gavin showpiece but it’s also really mean sounding with that bass part. It has the SW solo stylings (the loosely timed talking/singing and falsetto scats, the telecaster playing we’ve seen from him since To The Bone) but it also has probably the single heaviest sounding riff I’ve heard on a PT song yet. The calm bridge returns at the end and it concludes on an unresolved chord.. it’s just magical and unforgettable even after countless listens.
‘Chimera’s Wreck’ has this almost Tool-like feel with the triplet-rhythms and chanting from SW. It’s marvelous and something that really caught me off guard. It drives the song forward in a way that feels highly unusual and new for PT.
‘Walk the Plank’ is another standout to me. It sounds like a SW solo electronic track but is enhanced by the PT treatment. Actually Richard brought in the main elements of the track, and this has me excited for more electronic adventures in the future.
‘Dignity’ finally is a beautiful reminder that these are actually some of the people who made ‘Even Less’. It has that innocent sounding melody and atmosphere of the Stupid Dream / Lightbulb Sun era and I absolutely think it’s the best song of the album.
Finally, ‘Love in the Past Tense’ plays somewhat like the ending credits to the album. It sounds particularly carefree and it never ceases to put me in a blissful state of mind. I just love the main vamp of the song and it reminds me a lot of The Incident disc 2, especially ‘Flicker’ for some reason.
Anyway I don’t really have a conclusion yet but I just wanted to write down some of my thoughts on C / C. It’s great stuff!