The Wardrobe
Cups in Cupboard

"The Wardrobe" is yet another side project of Tony Wakeford, Mr. Sol Invictus, this time accompanied by Andrew Liles, a cult figure of the British post-industrial avant-garde, multi-instrumentalist, and composer from Steven Stapleton’s entourage (Nurse With Wound) and thus a privileged interlocutor with the "neo-folk" scene (the ties between Stapleton, Wakeford, and David Tibet date back to the dawn of their existence, when they shared an EP and a triple album, which for Sol was none other than Lex Talionis); therefore, it is no surprise of this seemingly ill-matched duo, especially since since 1992 Wakeford has harbored rather pronounced avant-garde ambitions (let us remember the collaborative album with Stapleton, Return of the Selfish Shellfish).

And it is precisely the memory of that album that the listening of the present Cups in Cupboard brings us back to, in its smokier and more expansive parts, but also in its brief sketches where the contribution of the corpulent minstrel presents itself in its proverbial roughness through haphazard arpeggios of acoustic guitar that intertwine with analog electronic sounds reminiscent of early Michael Waisvisz ("The Unopened Brown Envelope"); a few glimpses of pure Sol Invictus emerge in the elegy of "Swishing Stick", which leaves hanging the usual Wakeford-like chord progression until it becomes a sonic forest of chords and acoustic arpeggios, swept by the wind of the synthesizer (but worse is "Windows", little more than a solo Wakeford demo: 4 chords repeated to exhaustion). In "Arcade" the gurgling of the keyboards intertwines with a few distracted guitar notes like the incessant movement of a machine, while the piano ambient of "Lake and Tree" (with background waves lifted from the HaWthorn album) is little more than child's play.

Elsewhere, the project has melodic aspirations: it is in the opening of "Moth Balls", or in the long and pensive "The Smell of Paddling Pool" (perhaps the only truly atmospheric track on the album, whose basic idea is revisited in "Wind in the Willows"): it is in these snippets of soundtrack from a liturgical drama that the two personalities seem to blend in the most complete and painless way, elevating the sonic and conceptual perspective of the album beyond the horizon of a delirious game between nihilist performers; this is the best cue - and hope - that can be drawn from the album: usually Wakeford's projects have a false start before fully realizing their potential (see "Howden/Wakeford" and "L'Orchestre Noir"), it is therefore to be hoped that the second album of The Wardrobe will bring to fruition that little bit of fertility shown in the first collaboration.

 5/10