Blackfield

by

Blackfield

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A fantastic yet overlooked treasure, a work brimming with texture but listenable to anyone's taste, Blackfield's self-titled debut is an amazing album that really deserves all the attention it can get. It's the project of Steven Wilson (the mastermind behind No-Man and Porcupine Tree) and Aviv Geffen, who's apparently had a successful if controversial pop career in Israel. Count one for the "can anyone tell me why this isn't huge" file. You need this album.

Wilson's singing is much more prominent, but AG handles half the writing/instrument duties, even if his voice is mostly the backing one. The sound is basically melancholy pop (for lack of an appropriate label), but wonderfully layered and textured and impeccably produced, topped off with gorgeous harmonies and writing a lot more thoughtful than you'd find in the pop world at large. And that's not to mention the writing in the melody department, which is almost otherworldly. There's a dreamlike quality to a lot of the album, from "Glow"'s soft bed of keyboards to "Lullaby"'s simple haunting piano line (which would almost actually make it a good lullaby if it wasn't done in a minor key with some very non-soothing lyrics). "Scars" shuffles along on a lively beat and shifts into a grand sweeping chorus, but it doesn't even seem out of place. Some heavy moments come and go but they never interfere with the lushness of the experience. The consistently depressing tone is really the only reason I haven't glued one of the CD trays on my stereo shut with this disc in it... yet.

Where Wilson on his own can take seven or eight or thirteen minutes to say something, Geffen's taste for brevity keeps everything here comfortably below five. Unfortunately that means the album itself tops off at around 43 including the 'new' bonus tracks, but there isn't a wasted second to be heard. "Where Is My Love?" was left off the original edition because they thought it didn't quite fit with the Blackfield sound - why they thought that, I can't imagine - and the mesmerizing "Perfect World" was apparently cut at the last minute. If you need this album (and you do), then you also need those tracks to complete the picture. Thankfully that mistake's been fixed by their inclusion here along with a live "Cloudy Now."

Did I mention you need this album? You do. Your life will forever be just a tad incomplete without it.

Unfortunately, I can't agree with spiral_mind's excellently written, positive evaluation below.

Let's clear this up first and foremost.. I am a big Steve Wilson fan--as a producer, vocalist, musician, what have you. His own Porcupine Tree is hands-down the reigning champ of the neo-prog scene, 2002's In Absentia is a modern classic and the rest of the band's discography is generally quite awesome, and I await the next release Deadwing with bated breath.

This side project (a collab with Israeli musician Aviv Geffen), however, seems like a trifling attempt to tide us over. It sounds much like Porcupine Tree's earlier (and out-of-print) Stupid Dream, with much less of an "edge" and even fewer distorted guitars--which is not a bad thing in of itself. After all, I liked Opeth's Wilson-produced "soft" album Damnation, which shares a similar mood to this album but is deeper and more interesting. Blackfield is inoffensive, but boring. PT-lite, even. You could easily call it pop music, barring the lyrical content which is uniformly less than sunny.

Aside from some haunting piano work on Lullaby, a few scattered riffs (one of note on Open Mind), and a typically strong vocal performance by Wilson (good harmonies too) nothing really stands out here. It's *nice* and all, but "nice" is bland. I've come to expect more than that from an artist of Wilson's calibur. I have high hopes for Deadwing though.. we'll see.