Steven Wilson: Home Invasion - In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.5

Steven Wilson: Home Invasion - In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 1, 2018

It’s almost shockingly funny to hear Steven Wilson claim he doesn’t have much facility with visuals, a statement he makes during the affable interview that’s included on this Blu-ray as a supplement. Just take a look at some of the screenshots accompanying this review and you tell me — does the visual end of this concert look like it was masterminded by someone with no facility in that particular arena. Steven Wilson is my kind of genius — a guy who offers some stunningly diverse and typically impeccably produced music, but who isn’t above just lying down on stage and goofing around, or getting his Jagger on (with the same kinds of weird hand motions and other semi-spasmodic dance moves I mentioned in our Get All You Deserve Blu-ray review) during this live performance from London’s venerable Royal Albert Hall. When Wilson talks about wanting to join visuals to music (and how his dream is to ultimately one day score a film, which I personally hope he gets to do sooner rather than later), he may sound like a modern day Scriabin, and in fact his performance here can justifiably be called multimedia, since the venue has been adapted to have one screen in back of the performers and another, kind of scrim-like, sheet in front of the band, both of which contain projections of various kinds throughout the concert. Director James Russell goes a step further, often superimposing projections across the whole frame, and also offering some split screen moments, all of which I presume was done with some of Wilson’s non-facile input (yes, that’s a joke). Wilson’s Blu-ray output has been surprisingly prolific, and the releases of his which I’ve personally reviewed (Grace for Drowning, Get All You Deserve, The Raven That Refused to Sing) have frequently offered sometimes near hallucinatory visual elements along with Wilson’s multilayered and genre defying music. That’s certainly the case again here, though there’s the added input from Russell’s many cameras, including what I assume are drone shots taken from the very top of the Royal Albert Hall, looking down not just on the band, but the multitudes gathered there to enjoy the show.

The concert in fact opens with a public address announcer asking the audience to pay attention to a series of projections, all of which become increasingly provocative when the same image has different titles with completely different meanings superimposed on it (see screenshot 4 for an example, with the sidebar that this same image is later presented with "science" superimposed). Obviously, Wilson is not your "run of the mill" rock star, and is out to engage his audience on a perhaps more intellectual level than is often the case in arena venues. Wilson's music is similarly smart, often mixing dense lyrical concepts with a really fascinating array of instrumentation and styles that vary from folkish moments to prog rock and jazz.

Steven and the band play the following songs during the concert:

"Truth" (Intro )
Nowhere Now
Pariah
Home Invasion / Regret #9
The Creator Has a Mastertape
Refuge
People Who Eat Darkness
Ancestral
Arriving Somewhere But Not Here
Permanating
Song of I
Lazarus
Detonation
The Same Asylum as Before
Song of Unborn
Vermillioncore
Sleep Together
Even Less
Blank Tapes
Sound of Muzak
The Raven That Refused to Sing

Steven Wilson: Home Invasion - In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Steven Wilson: Home Invasion In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eagle Vision, an imprint of Eagle Rock Entertainment, and Universal Music with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. The concert is often a visual phantasmagoria courtesy of some vivid lighting choices, including lots of purples and blues, but perhaps more especially due to the many projections that appear both behind and in front of the band. Some of these introduce hazy, gauze like effects over the band itself, but detail levels remain surprisingly strong throughout the presentation, and even when bathed in deep purples (no pun intended) and blues, surfaces like drum heads don't ever lapse into posterizing anomalies. Black levels are solid, and in fact are so deep that occasionally players can't quite be made out when the lighting isn't sufficient.

Steven Wilson: Home Invasion - In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Steven Wilson: Home Invasion In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall features LPCM 2.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks, both 96/24. The disc is authored to default to the stereo track, and as I often tend to experience with these releases, I found Steven's vocals a bit more forward in this version than on the surround track. He even talks in a kind of quiet voice between several songs, and even his spoken word I found a bit easier to make out on the stereo track. That said, the surround track is sumptuously spacious, offering superb breathing room for what often densely layered instrumentals underlying the equally stacked vocals. Fidelity is excellent on both tracks, and there are no problems of any kind to report.

Steven Wilson: Home Invasion - In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Rehearsal Tracks are all interesting in that they not only document the band getting ready for the performance, they all include some of the cool drone work and projections that are part of the concert:

  Routine (1080p; 9:03)

  
  

  Hand Cannot Erase (1080p; 4:13)

  
  

  Heart Attack in a Layby (1080p; 4:24)

• Interview (1080p; 8:49) is a fun set of interactions with a barefoot Wilson.

Additionally, 2 Bonus CDs of the concert are included in the package.

Steven Wilson: Home Invasion - In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's a good thing in my estimation that Steven Wilson's music is in many ways indescribable, or at least easy to pigeonhole. He once again thoroughly impressed me with this concert, and the added visual "bells and whistles" are often quite interesting. Occasionally director James Russell goes for the hyperkinetic editing overkill a bit too aggressively (as in the opening of "Home Invasion"), but on the whole the coverage here is really interesting, and the overlays of imagery often as provocative as the songs. Technical merits are first rate, and Steven Wilson: Home Invasion In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall comes Highly recommended.