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 refused to serve in his army on principle, the kind of refusal that costs you something where he is from. He also walked away from a military bloodline most people would have leaned on. The fury in that chorus is not a writing exercise for him. It came from a real place, and from a real fight, and you can hear that it is older and harder than the soft tune carrying it.
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 keeps the line "we gotta get out of here", but the original wasn't private restlessness. It was a generation saying it out loud, together.
“The man who wrote this anti-establishment anthem was an outsider by birth.”
He was the establishment's own blood. Aviv Geffen, who refused to serve in the army and wrote a generation's protest against the state, is a great-nephew of General Moshe Dayan, one of Israel's most famous war heroes. The conscientious objector singing "we gotta get out of here" came from the family at the very center of the country he was fighting.
Blackfield · Welcome to My DNA · 2011
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