Wax Mannequin
The Red Brain
The thing about middle-age, and aging, really, is that you don’t feel a slowing of pace so much as you feel everything, everywhere, all at once. When I turned 40 — nearly twenty years ago — I couldn’t feel in straight lines: it was joy and speed one day, a slow sadness the next, and then anger, then relief, then uncertainty, then confidence and vitality. The future seemed bright and the past seemed dark until those things traded places. The overwhelming part of aging, at least for me, wasn’t a dread of death or demise so much as it was not being able to settle into an emotional narrative and living there for awhile. My heart darted about like a quick, small fish that I could never slow long enough to carry around in my hands. The level of later aging — lapsing into the calm routine of dinner by 7, bed by 11, a drink and some fun one night a week, maybe two — almost came as a relief.
To say that Wax Mannequin’s wonderful new record, The Red Brain, is precisely about this is to build my own personal box in which to fit it, but there’s still a day-in-the-life Everyman veracity to the album, which addresses the emotional complexities of middle-age-hood in the aching “Love is a Hunter,” the moving “Things to do With Rage,” and the unhooked “Reasons,” a complex album signature that asks what King Crimson might have sounded like had they formed in 1977. The challenges and horrors of growing up is couched in the adolescent reflection of “Sick Boy” — an affecting “Lord of the Flies” klezmer — and there’s deep resignation in the album’s closer, “Not the Worst it Gets,” where a piano figure and beautiful vocal reminds the listener of the best of Vic Chesnutt. Last month, the New Yorker wrote about the “Sad Dad” movement in Indie Rock as evinced by the latest record by the National, but that sadness, and parenthood, is wrapped in the thorns of other emotions, too, and here Wax Mannequin reminds us that aging is a crooked arrow. At times, The Red Brain churns and roars with waving arms and kicking legs — the title song is an ocean liner of sound and noise and strings — as effortlessly as it explores the deep vessels of the heart. Like many great personal works, it’s a concept album about the singer, and that it’s executed without being boiled in narcissism and tiresome self-reflection is a rare triumph. Highly recommended.
Buy the record on Bandcamp HERE
Well said! Love your assessment of the complexities of ageing & this musical outing. Made me want to hear it immediately .... off to the headphones