Album of the Week: To the Bone

Let's see what's new with our Record Club alumni. Any news to share? Weird Al and Tim Heidecker teamed up to cover a Tom Petty song. WILLOW's dad is about to slap an album in our faces, and he's promoting it by making TikToks with Doechii. Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh was honored with a street name outside the Capitol Theater, where Lake Street Dive and Darryl Hall are playing this year. No Doubt's Gwen Stefani is a conservative religious nut. Transatlanticism is a screamo album now. Beck and Phish's Trey Anastasio are out here covering Stevie Wonder with Cher. In the cutest news, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus of boygenius are now officially an item (poor Phoebe).

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WEEK 321 — March 23-29, 2025

To the Bone

by Steven Wilson

LISTEN:

Spotify | YouTube | Bandcamp | Apple

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PICKED BY GLORIA

GLORIA'S COMMENTS: "This album doesn't have a single boring track. Hopefully, you'll agree with me on that, haha. It's mainly progressive pop, the genre you didn't know you needed in your life! 

"I've been a long-time fan of Steven Wilson and any band/project he's been a part of—Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No-Man, Storm Corrosion... He is also among the best artists I've seen live. I'm grateful that I could see him at the Keswick Theater in 2018 for the tour promoting this album. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!"

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ALBUM DETAILS

GENRE: Progressive pop, art rock, pop pock, progressive rock, art pop

RELEASED: August 18, 2017

LENGTH: 59:46

TRACKLIST:

1. To the Bone
2. Nowhere Now
3. Pariah
4. The Same Asylum as Before
5. Refuge
6. Permanating
7. Blank Tapes
8. People Who Eat Darkness
9. Song of I
10. Detonation
11. Song of Unborn

LYRICS: Genius.com

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ARTIST DETAILS

PRONOUNS: He/him/his

ABOUT: Steven John Wilson was born on November 3, 1967, in Kingston upon Thames, London, England. Described as "probably the most successful British artist you've never heard of," Wilson has been a prolific artist for the past 40 years. He is primarily known as the frontman for the band Porcupine Tree, but, as Gloria noted above, he's been involved in a few other bands, and plus has an extensive solo discography as well. Wilson is a self-taught musician, inspired by his parents' LPs by Pink Floyd and Donna Summer to get into music. In addition to being a lead musician, he's built a side-gig of remixing classic albums in a new stereo 5.1 sound. Wilson is a vegan and an atheist, and has a dog named Bowie.

DISCOGRAPHY: To the Bone is Steven Wilson's fifth of eight solo albums. The first was 2008's Insurgentes, and the most recent dropped nine days ago, called The Overview. There are plenty of other LPs from Wilson's other projects, like the eleven albums by Porcupine Trees.

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ADDITIONAL INFO

READING SOME SHIT: An interview with Super Deluxe Edition from six days ago

WATCHING SOME SHIT: the title track live in 2018

RECORD CLUB CONNECTIONS: He's worked with Yoko Ono, remixed Grateful Dead, covered Alanis Morissette, and reviewed In Rainbows by Radiohead for the Spanish-language version of Rolling Stone. There were also numerous points of contact with Genesis that I won't bother listing out here. As far as I could tell, there's been five Wilsons on Record Club albums before—Charlotte Day Wilson was featured on BUBBA, Chris Wilson is the drummer for Titus Andronicus, and then of course the three Wilson brothers on The Beach Boys' Christmas Album. The other Stevens I could find were Steve Earle, Constantines lead guitarist Steve Lambke, and Thursday lead guitarist Steve Pedulla, and that's without counting Sufjan Stevens (or Fisher Stevens, costar of the CLASSIC 1993 feature film Super Mario Bros.).

MENTIONS ON THE BLOG: None yet! "Most successful British artist you've never heard of" indeed. I tried doing blogspot searches on "Porcupine" as well, and all I got was Scarlett Johansson's Sing 2 character and Sam's fear of getting stung by a porcupine because of Homeward Bound.

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OTHER ALBUMS TO CHECK OUT

LAST WEEK'S ALBUM: Full Collapse by Thursday, and make sure to check out the reviews if you wanna see what we thought of it!

RC@5: We're relistening to the Record Club album we featured exactly five years ago this week. The RC album for this week in 2020 was Let It Grow EP by Mountain Brews.

SHADOW RECORD CLUB: Each week, I'm exploring a genre of last week's album by listening to one of that genre's top-rated albums. Last week's Full Collapse was a mall screamo album. We're listening this week to They're Only Chasing Safety by Underoath.

NEXT WEEK'S RC ALBUM: In case you need some extra time with an album to write a review for it, you can get a head start on Long Lost by Lord Huron!

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Happy listening, RC family!
Have a great week!