The Wardrobe
A Sandwich Short

In 2005, Andrew Liles (already a collaborator of Nurse With Wound) and Tony Wakeford (the mind behind the neofolk ensemble Sol Invictus) gave life to The Wardrobe, an avant-garde ambient project tinged with guitar arpeggios; however, a sense of expansive incompleteness, of a willful extension without a true purpose, a true rounding, reigned over the eleven tracks of the debut. It was a good album, but scattered and chatty, and not without embarrassing moments, so much so that, in evaluating it, we expressed the hope for future growth of the collaboration, already knowing that a second album existed, namely this one.

It is now evident how this hope has been shattered on all fronts: "A Sandwich Short" is even more rough, exhausting, episodic than its predecessor, sacrificing its considerable cohesion in a series of isolated episodes that never seem to develop a concrete or conclusive musical discourse, but limit themselves to an allusive self-referentiality and fade away without leaving a precise impression on the listener. With the exception of a few melodic glimpses (Wednesday) that echo the more sleepy parts of the previous work, it consists of sound vignettes marred by entropic and tense electronic sounds, left in a state of pure draft or, even, of a haphazard semi-improvised jumble (In Defence of Shoplifting), leading one to wonder how much time was actually needed to conceive (?) and realize such an album.

The references to Wakeford and Steven Stapleton's (NWW) 1992 album are even stronger here: the beautiful "Lucifer Before Sunrise" is "revived" but in a spoken version by a female voice, and the atmosphere of "Another Drink?" harks back to similar interludes of that album; however, here it seems that Liles bends, perhaps out of laziness, to the childish concept of "avant-garde" advocated by the corpulent Wakeford, that is, to music that is senseless and smeared with very few sonic and melodic ideas, reveling in simple and tedious vignettes entrusted to the overall atmosphere of the album, itself increasingly generic and wholly insufficient to sustain a project without head or tail.

4/10