Abum Review: WIM, WIM

30 June 2011

by Caitlin Welsh

There’s a recognisably cinematic air to WIM’s debut, which is a thing reviewers say when music conjures up something more substantial than just a 'mood'; when it evokes pictures, grainy or gleaming or exotic or deeply familiar.

In WIM’s case, it's a dark fairy tale – the old-fashioned, everybody-dies-in-the-forest gloom of a Christian Andersen original, or perhaps the seamy, misanthropic whimsy of Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Tim Burton. From the creepy-children chorale of ‘See You Hurry’ to the waltzing accordion of ‘John’, WIM have mined evocative effects to create a polished yet pleasantly peculiar sound.

The band’s best asset is singer Martin Solomon. His voice is a lovely thing, supple and sweet; it’s often reminiscent of Rufus Wainwright’s, lean and crooning one moment and stretching into a careless falsetto the next. But Solomon lacks Wainwright’s arch self-awareness as a vocalist, and it’s hard to get a sense of the person behind the pipes. The lyrics are so steeped in earthy, old-fashioned mythology and emotions – seahorses and water-babies, lamp-posts and love notes and looms – that the songs often feel similarly impersonal.

Several songs with a ‘60s feel stand out in particular for some reason – the Abbey Road strut of ‘Something For You’, which has more than a little of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ in its wry guitars, and the wistful sturdiness of ‘Monster And Me’, which has Solomon channelling Ray Davies just a tad. But WIM also have a way with a tune, and the ones here are almost uniformly lovely, melodies of hills and valleys, bucolic and rolling.

WIM are not quite the groundbreaking folk-pop pioneers we’ve been led to expect from a couple of years of gentle hype, but this is a signing experiment that should pay off for Modular in the long run.