Steven Wilson

If Steven Wilson is largely unknown in the Entertainment Weekly/"American Idol" community that drives popular music and drools over the likes of Katy Perry and Florida Georgia Line, he's nonetheless a true giant and visionary in the relatively small but sophisticated community of modern rock. Frankly, he's a genius. Now four albums into a post-Porcupine Tree solo career, Wilson continues to find new sonic frontiers to explore with glorious, inventive and beautifully realized imagination. Where his previous album, the very successful "The Raven That Refused to Sing," was a jazz-textured adventure in the spirit of King Crimson's "Lizard," "Hand. Cannot. Erase" takes a completely different approach. It's a concept album inspired by the real-life case of a London woman - with friends and a job, not a transient - whose corpse was discovered in her apartment three years after she died at 38. Somehow, no one missed her. Wilson uses that as a jumping off point to examine the odd anonymity of modern life from a tenderly feminine perspective - and does so in ways that range from heartbreakingly gorgeous to churning and mesmeric. Go ahead: Close the year-end polls in March. This one is just a tremendous wonder-work.

- RICK KOSTER