Leave another day

The album opens in a liminal space. “Wait/Days/Tonight I wait,” he moans over acoustic guitars and sighing reeds, his voice tired and weary, too tired to get more than one syllable out at a time. On the next song, “All the Way,” he picks up on the subject — “Should I stay and wait,” he asks at the start — while amplifying his sound, now a shimmering psych-rock rock. It's a plaintive song about unrequited love, and while the lyrics tell part of the story, its essence is his voice – hurt, bruised and a little sullen. He outlines the story over the course of the album's 12 songs, stumbling from hope to hostile desire and self-loathing. There are hints of subtle violence (“Now you're freaking out/Now there's blood in the kitchen”) and occasionally superficial (“Let me raise my glass to feel better again/Because I'm not who I want to be when you're in front of me”). A seductive prankster, he's fascinating, but it's hard to shake the suspicion that if he were your ex, you'd be changing the locks. Like the radio broadcast in Foreignwhat looks like an SOS can really be a warning beacon — and I suspect even he knows that.

Leave another day it feels like part of a new wave of déjà vu pop, not unlike ML Buch's Sunbathing and Total Blue's Total Blue. Milan W.'s album doesn't really sound like either of those records, but it makes equally unusual use of its inspirations. Some influences are not hard to hear: the Cocteau Twins in their major label phase, the acoustic period of the Swans (The Burning World, White light from the mouth of infinity), the hi-def solo work of Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy, and, especially, The Church Starfishthe exciting, psychedelic dream-pop work of the Australian group. In places, Milan W.'s crazy design suggests Kurt Vile, if the Philadelphia guitarist had been raised on goth instead of classic rock, and at least some of the efforts to promote the label clearly intended to challenge the Smiths. But none of the album's reference points are exactly obvious, and the fact that people are hearing such radically different things on it shows how unusual the record is.