Wax Mannequin
Photo credit: Kidd Gloves Photography
Seventh Solo Album “The Red Brain” Out Now via Coax Records and Label Fantastic! Find it on bandcamp here
Adeney’s music veers from scrappy prog oddness and alt-folk to absurdist stadium metal, all with a dark, contemplative humour that at times borders on outright Dadaism. Beneath the unsettling imagery and musical left turns there is a steady questioning of life’s inherent strangeness and his own neuro-divergent experience. Wax Mannequin has appeared on thousands of pub, gallery and festival stages worldwide.
About Wax Mannequin and The Red Brain:
Wax and Wane
Dave Bidini / West End Phoenix
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.
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The Red Brain summer tour:
Wax Mannequin Western Canada Tour
July 14 – Toronto – Music on the River - (Humber River)
July 15 – Hamilton – The Casbah
July 21 – London – Palisade Social Bowl
July 28 – Guelph – Hillside Festival
Aug 9 – Wells BC - Sarra’s
Aug 10 – Prince George BC, The Legion
Aug 11 – Vancouver BC – Lanalou’s
Aug 12 – Nelson BC – The Royal
Aug 13 – Kelowna TBA
Aug 15 – Penticton BC – Brit Bar
Aug 16 – Quesnel BC/Williams Lake – BC TBA
Aug 17 – Smithers BC – CICK Radio
Aug 18 – MOM Festival – Fort St James, BC
Aug 19 – MOM Festival – Fort St James, BC
Aug 20 – MOM Festival – Fort St James, BC
Aug 22 – Sudbury – The Lounge
Aug 24 – Thunder Bay – The Foundry
Aug 25 – Tumblestone Festival – Thunder Bay
Aug 26 – Tumblestone Festival – Thunder Bay