It is nice to know that there are still people out there with very strange ideas, sufficiently demonstrated by this album, the second collaborative effort from Tony Wakeford and Andrew Liles. However, in a world in which Nurse With Wound is working on a HipHop album, and David Tibet is both a professed Christian and a cabinet member of the OTO, perhaps the word "strange" needs to be redefined.For their second outing as The Wardrobe, Liles and Wakeford redefine the parameters of strangeness with an album that marries lovely, emotive, nostalgic instrumentals to the shudders and creaks of old Victoriana. More often than not, the songs meander and drift through the cobwebby attics of old English country houses, the eerie and insistent presence of memory creating an uncanny atmosphere that fairly sparks with ghostly electricity. Eerie electrical portals to other worlds are found amidst the creaking floorboards and old, out-of-tune pianos, dusty guitars and rusty accordions. Without warning, atmospheric melodies are overtaken by the free play of the unconscious, eccentric intrusions from out of the ether, snatches of warped dialogue, wobbly old 78s or incongruous sound effects suites pop in and out with a refreshing absence of logic.
Whereas the title of Cups in Cupboard, the duo's first album, signified a measured appropriateness—cups in the cupboard, everything in its right place—the title of this sophomore album suggests incompleteness, lunacy and lame-brained-ness: "She's a few sandwiches short of a picnic, that one." Apropos of this contrast in title, the new album is not as pleasing and tuneful as that first album, preferring instead to push out the boundaries of discomfort, finding ever newer ways to subtly dislocate the listener in time and space. While the opening piano dirge "Wednesday" seems to start off in the same general ballpark as Cups, it soon descends into an eerie, droning netherworld, with a tinkling counter-melody that constantly threatens to derail the funereal proceedings. Everything finally digresses into buzzing electric insectoid oblivion, a miasma of withering 19th century parlor music, like watching a Merchant Ivory film on acid.
Things only get wackier from this point with the whimsically ramshackle "Horse With One Leg" and the heavily intoxicated, messily percussive strains of "Another Drink?". "Lucifer Before Sunrise" will be the most pleasurable track for old-school Nurse With Wound fans, a reworking of a track that originally appeared on Stapleton and Wakeford's sole collaboration The Revenge of the Selfish Shellfish. This time, the deeply weird crypto-Satanic text is read aloud by Colin Potter's daughters (internal rhyme unintentional), as skeletal guitar figures are licked by crackling flames. The Potter girls' spooky voices are twisted and mutated, scattered around the stereo channels, before being joined by Wakeford's morbid, gravelly vocals, so familiar from well-worn Sol Invictus records from the past two decades. Everything you loved about the English underground esoteric music scene, all in the span of five minutes.
Since Current 93 and Nurse With Wound have apparently decided to take permanent vacations from these kinds of fucked gothic sound experiments, it's nice to hear the flag still being carried by Liles and Wakeford. A Sandwich Short is the perfect mix of disarming melodies and outre electronic textures, with lots of delightfully menacing moments of plain, old-fashioned sinister whimsy.
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