Steven Wilson built his name on the long way round. Porcupine Tree songs that take their time, that double back, that make you wait. Blackfield is the inverse on purpose. Short. Sad. A verse, a chorus, out. He has said as much: this project was the deliberate opposite of his other band, a place to write the small song instead of the sprawling one.
“Cloudy Now” sits eight tracks deep on the 2004 debut, Wilson singing lead in English, the melody plain enough to hum on first pass. It sounds like a young man’s melancholy delivered by a man who is no longer young. That gap is the first thing to notice. The voice is calm. The thing underneath it is not.
Because Blackfield was not Wilson’s idea. It belonged to the man beside him, Aviv Geffen, the Israeli musician Wilson met after taking Porcupine Tree to Tel Aviv in 2000. The two of them clicked over a shared taste for sadness done plainly, and Geffen is the reason this band exists at all. Wilson sings most of it. But the centre of gravity is somewhere else, and it is worth asking where this particular song was really standing before it arrived in your headphones in English.
A quiet English ballad with a much louder song buried inside it.
That is the itch the track keeps scratching at. For something this gentle, the chorus does not behave gently. It stops being a private ache and turns outward, passing a flat, furious verdict on a whole generation. A breakup song does not do that. A mood piece does not do that. Something angrier is wearing the ballad as a coat, and the coat does not quite cover it.
Geffen is the tell. He is the son of one of his country’s most celebrated poets, and he never did his military service. He puts that down to medical reasons, but early on he also spoke out against conscription, loudly enough to start public storms, and in 1996 President Ezer Weizman called him a symbol of draft evasion. He came from a military bloodline most people would have leaned on, and by his own account he broke the chain. The fury in that chorus came from a real fight.
So play it twice. Once as the quiet English ballad it is dressed up to be. And once listening for the thing it keeps not saying.
Surface any pearl, in any order, to hear what's really going on.
“A quiet English melancholy-pop song from a 2004 art-rock debut.”
It is an English version of a decade-old Hebrew song. Aviv Geffen wrote "Achshav Me'unan" in 1993; it went gold in Israel that year as the title track of his second album. By the time Steven Wilson sang it in English, the song had already been a hit for eleven years in another language, on another continent, to a generation that knew every word.
“A pretty, sad song about feeling lost and wanting to leave.”
In its original Hebrew, it was a protest anthem. The 1993 version gave voice to a wave of Israeli youth furious with their government, and became a defining song of the "Moonlight Children," a whole youth subculture. The English version keeps the song's urge to leave, but in the original that urge wasn't private restlessness. It was a generation saying it out loud, together, to the people running the country.
“The man who wrote this anti-establishment anthem was an outsider by birth.”
He was born inside the establishment. Aviv Geffen comes from the family of General Moshe Dayan, one of Israel's most famous war heroes; Geffen calls Dayan his uncle and a symbol of Israeli machismo. Geffen never served in the army, for medical reasons, he says, and early in his career he spoke out against conscription, setting off public storms. In 1996 President Ezer Weizman called him a symbol of draft evasion. His own phrase for what he did to that inheritance: he "broke the chain."
Blackfield · Welcome to My DNA · 2011
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