You can never be sure what year it is on a 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 took cues from , , and the compilations; the nine-piece got its start as giallo/ cosplayers with a thing for Turkish psych; the more tongue-in-cheek dealt in gothic surf covers of , , and .
But in the duo , the Antwerp musician born Milan Warmoeskerken began to ask other questions, like: Or: The timeline and reference points have only gotten slipperier in Milan W.’s solo music, which has progressed from to and . Now, with , 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 , 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.