Quick Reviews: Wig Wam & Khymera

Two more albums this week. Are they melodic goodness?

Wig Wam - Out Of The Dark

The previous Wig Wam album was pretty good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the Dracula album Trond Holter had made, nor the Ammunition album Ale made with Erik Martensson. Perhaps the reason for that can be found judging a book by its cover, as the cartoon art the album comes with is ripped right from the 80s, as is much of the ethos of this record. When "Ghosting You" starts talking about 'a pile of cocaine', I'm transported back to the worst days of rock, when it seemed like every song was about assholes being asshole, and being celebrated for the fact.

I think there's something interesting to be done with the more metallic guitar tone used here, and the band can definitely write a hook, but the pervasive air of the 80s puts me off. We're thirty-three years past the expiration of that decade, and yet it continues to be inescapable. I don't recall very much 50s revivalism during my youth, so the inability for pop culture to move on is a fascinating push to end evolution.

Look, this kind of record is only going to be able to go so far with me. That's how far it goes, and no more. It's fine, but nothing I'm ever going to connect with.

Khymera - Hold Your Ground

I'm not sure exactly what it is about AOR, but pretty much every time I listen to anything I get recommended as being amazing, it comes across sounding entirely flat. There's something about the sweet and soothing sound of the genre that doesn't enable the melodies to ever have the 'hook factor' I'm looking for. Khymera falls into that same category, even though I can hear why they should have more appeal.

There are a couple of songs in the middle of the record, "Sail On Forever" and "Our Love Is Killing Me", where the melodies have the contours of something I know I should like. And yet, listening to them, they hit me like a pillow. That doesn't quite make sense, but it does fit in with my old belief that neither volume, tuning, nor distortion make something heavy on their own. That comes down to how something is performed, and that might be the case here as well. The music is performed in a way to be soft and melodic, which actually does the opposite.

That means once again, Khymera's music is pleasant enough, but toothless. AOR continues to confound me, and the first song I ever heard from the band remains a fluke that so far has convinced me to give them more chances than I perhaps should. Maybe I've learned my lesson this time.