Head. Cannot. Erase
Alright. I think Steven Wilson is great. He doesn't always hit the mark for me, but he's always trying something a little different, even if it's just because it hasn't been done in a while.
His latest release, Hand.Cannot.Erase, is his most genius work so far IMHO. It has pop elements that stick in your head but also has deeply complicated riffs and rhythms. Plus, a lot of orchestration. Progressive rock at its best. And I love progressive rock.
Then, I read about what inspired the album. Sheesh. I wish I had spent the money and had gotten the media book version, but so often those extra DVDs end up so boring to me. I really don't care what time an artist eats lunch...if you know what I mean. Anyway, so the inspiration came from a movie (as yet unseen by me) called "Dreams of a Life" in which a director attempts to piece together what could have happened to a woman who was only 38, beautiful, vivacious, supposedly had many friends and boyfriends, yet died alone in her apartment and wasn't found until TWO YEARS later. Wow. So I have become interested in this woman now, too. If you look her up on Wikipedia (Joyce Vincent) you will find a rather interesting story that has many big holes. The woman apparently escaped a violent relationship with a husband or boyfriend and was hidden away in a women's shelter in London somewhere. When she left the shelter, they gave her a tiny apartment above a shopping mall. A large portion of the bills were paid by whatever government group pays these things over there. Yet, even before any of this happened, she seemed to be withdrawing more and more from the world. Even more so after she took the tiny apartment. She lost contact with her family, who sounded like they were an okay family even though they didn't say a to the press. Was this woman sinking more and more into a deep depression? Was it a suicide? Because the body had almost completely decomposed, the coroner had nothing to work with and no cause of death could be explained. There was mention of "medication" but never what the medication was. She was found with a bunch of wrapped gifts for Christmas around her but no indication as to who the gifts were for. It wasn't mentioned what these gifts were, that would suggest who they were possibly for. Some thought she bought them for herself.
It was a druggie-infested neighborhood. Maybe she got hold of some bad street drugs? One neighbor said that the window had always been open with the curtain billowing out until about six months before the body was found and the window was suddenly closed most of the way. I can only picture either some junkies or some neighborhood kids breaking into what they had long-thought was an empty apartment only to find a corpse. What would you do if you were a person living on the edge?
No one thought much about the apartment. The television was on 24/7, but no one was alarmed because it was a "druggie neighborhood" where people were up all hours anyway, I guess. They attributed the smell of the rotting corpse to the garbage bins behind the building (and the mall).
No one from the women's shelter or the agency that paid the rent ever bothered to come and check on her. They only discovered her because the part of the rent that she was supposed to pay had become exorbitant and they went in to evict her. Surprise!!
It's very haunting thinking of this poor woman just slowly rotting away in an apartment for two years.
It could happen to anyone. It could happen to me.
