(Album of the Week 10-3-10-7)
Have you ever thought of tracing a dagger across the vulnerable skin shrouding your necks arteries? Certainly the mere
thought of something this grandiose must have crossed your mind at one point or another, but who am I to suggest such folly?
No, I’ll leave suicide to those strong enough to cross a threshold into the unknown, for I am only pretentious enough to daydream
about my own entombment with the lumbering Funeral Doom of ‘Wijlen Wij’ transporting me to the realm of we who where once alive.
Wijlen Wij is a band mastered from the melancholic experiences of Solicide, Pantheist, and Until Death Overtakes Me with elements
of Thergothon and a changeup pitch reeking of renaissance music. The music whirrs in a listless rampage like snowy white caps
atop massive ocean swells. Guitars are a fuzzy buzzing hangover throbbing inescapably languid as they move at an ultra slow
motion rate. Harmonics ring with the chiming portent of a distant guillotine. Gregorian chants billow a hypnotic dirge, and I
swear I saw my funeral procession pass coquettishly on the lips of Polynesian dancers transmogrified into tattered ghosts whose
bleeding grass skirts swallowed my frigid soul. Symmetrical synthesizer is blissfully decrepit while offsetting the smothering
drone of the guitars.
All of the tracks on ‘Wijlen Wij’ are exceptional, but “Bridges” is clearly a standout melody. For 21:12 this song beats
out a mesmerizing timpani tolling the plodding iron sweat of an army crossing into battle. Vocals are an abysmal glossolalia
of growls in an intoxicating melancholia that reverberates via esophagus and echo. Guitars drudge from sepulture at 10:17
with the beauty of a prom queen turned leper; her sore scattered hands run soothingly across pink flesh in musical renaissance.
Yes, this is sorrow, this is malaise, this is despondency, and it beckons like the ecstasy of a poison droplet on a glass of merlot.
‘Wijlen Wij’ is utter madness, but somehow the music is conducted in a controlled bit of chaotic schizophrenic paranoia like
Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov lumbering through analyzing murder, and alibi, but contrition via exile does not exist. No,
the music of Wijlen Wij is as impressionable as a scar and what this band has achieved is definitely one of the best recordings
of 2007… Were I to trace that sullen blade across my meek throat I’d surely do it with the accompaniment of we who were once alive.
Mike Lidia
