You can never be sure what year it is on a Milan W. record. The Belgian musician seems to exist outside time, too wily to be pinned down to any given period or style. A decade ago, some of his bands pursued a more studiously retro approach: His trio Beach took cues from Mudhoney, the Stooges, and the Nuggets compilations; the nine-piece Condor Gruppe got its start as giallo/Morricone cosplayers with a thing for Turkish psych; the more tongue-in-cheek Tone Zones dealt in gothic surf covers of the Ventures, the Shadows, and Front 242. But in the duo Mittland och Leo, the Antwerp musician born Milan Warmoeskerken began to ask other questions, like: What might space-age lounge music sound like if performed by a depressed church organist? Or: What if Suicide’s Martin Rev had a hobby pressing flowers?
The timeline and reference points have only gotten slipperier in Milan W.’s solo music, which has progressed from burbly braindance and atmospheric exotica to foggy ambient techno and haunted electronic chamber pieces. Now, with Leave Another Day, he marks a major step forward, even as he slips sideways into yet another ambiguously retro zone. His first proper singer-songwriter album, it’s a dream-pop fever haze steeped in half-remembered sounds of the 1980s, and bearing all the gravitas of a battered hardback notebook stained with coffee, smelling of tobacco, and smudged by the gloomy Mitteleuropean rain.
It’s a major shift in sound: Where Milan W.’s previous solo albums, all of them instrumental, were made of gauzy synths and sputtering electronic rhythms, on Leave Another Day, he assembles a vivid palette out of lush, opulent instruments and tone colors: spidery acoustic guitar, soft woodwinds, and muscular electric bass. It’s a breakup album, essentially—a suite of twisted love songs poisoned by toxic desire—and every detail has been lovingly molded to match the bleakly masochistic mood. His fingerpicking is languid and desultory, his reeds a chorus of crestfallen birds. His instrumental backdrops shimmer like stars on a moonless night. He’s got a voice like motor oil being poured into a funnel—thick and black and glistening, as sinister as it is sensuous.
The album opens in a liminal space. “Wait/Days/Tonight I wait,” he moans over fingerpicked acoustic guitars and sighing reeds, his voice haggard and weary, too tired to eke out more than one syllable at a time. In the next song, “All the Way,” he picks up the theme—“Should I stay and wait,” he asks at the outset—while beefing up his sound, now a sparkling psych-rock dirge. It’s a plaintive song about unrequited love, and while the lyrics tell part of the story, the crux of it is his voice—pained, bruised, and a little sullen. He sketches the outline of the story over the course of the album’s 12 songs, stumbling from hope to hostile want to plain self-loathing. There are intimations of hidden violence (“You freak out/Now there’s blood in the kitchen”) and occasional epiphanies (“Let me raise my glass to feeling better again/Cause I’m not who I want to be when you’re in front of me”). A seductive crooner, he’s compelling company, yet it becomes hard to escape the suspicion that if he was your ex, you’d be changing the locks. Like the radio transmission in Alien, what looks like an S.O.S. might really be a warning beacon—and I suspect that even he knows that.
Leave Another Day feels like part of a new wave of déjà vu pop, not unlike ML Buch’s Suntub and Total Blue’s Total Blue. Milan W.’s album doesn’t really sound like either of those records, but it makes similarly uncanny use of its inspirations. Certain influences aren’t hard to hear: the Cocteau Twins in their major-label phase, Swans’ acoustic period (The Burning World, White Light From the Mouth of Infinity), Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy’s hi-def solo work, and, especially, the Church’s Starfish, the Australian group’s jangling, psychedelic dream-pop opus. In places, Milan W.’s woozy drawl suggests Kurt Vile, if the Philadelphia guitarist had grown up on goth instead of classic rock, and at least some of the label’s promotional efforts are clearly meant to evoke the Smiths. But none of the album’s reference points are exactly obvious, and the fact that people hear such radically different things in it speaks to just how unusual the record is.
The structure of the album loosely follows the course of an unhealthy relationship: the breakup, the recriminations, the determination to move on—and then, on the last song, the album’s protagonist returns to his lover, reprising the purgatorial lyrics of the opening “Wait.” It’s a clever move, laying bare the way certain unhealthy relationships exert a gravitational pull that we’re powerless to resist. The self-destructive mood is decadent and addictive, like the last drink of the night that you know you shouldn’t have, even as the glass is rising to your lips. For incurable romantics and fans of feeling bad, Milan W.’s sumptuously dejected record has a similar attraction. Maybe, just maybe, Leave Another Day is really an allegory about music fandom. Maybe his conflicted romance is really just a story about retro sounds: You know you should move on and look for something new—but sometimes, you just want to luxuriate in the all-consuming morass of half-remembered new wave at its most gloriously morose.
