If you want an insight into why The Future Bites sounds the way it does, look no further than the album’s fourth track, 12 THINGS I FORGOT, and the lyric, ‘I just sit in the corner complaining / Making out things were best in the eighties’. We can’t attest to Steven Wilson’s status as a curmudgeon – he’s always seemed a jolly nice bloke to us – but he’s certainly made no secret here of his love for the music from the ‘Greed decade’. Steven is far from gluttonous on The Future Bites, though. While the idea of this restless prog nomad embracing electronics might conjure ideas of nuclear bombast, the reality proves more restrained. Arrangements are slick but sparse, clinical canvases on which melodies bloom one after another, resulting in a mature strain of pop tha...
