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David Cronenberg's Wife

Bluebeard's Rooms

Label: Blang

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Amongst the leaders in London’s antifolk movement, David Cronenberg’s Wife is a tricky band to define. Named after the spouse of the cult Canadian horror director responsible for The Fly and Scanners, they are in many respects fittingly monikered. Whilst the music suggests a dark and po-faced seriousness, there seems to be more than a hint of self-mockery in Tom Mayne’s lyrical delivery, and when he spits out lines like “What would you think if I said I married you, just to get close to your teenage daughter?” the divide between the comic and the serious blurs beyond identification.

Paranoid, sinister and with a sense of humour black enough to swallow gravity itself, there is more than echoes of The Fall to Bluebeard’s Room; the lingering sense of urgency hiding just beneath the chugging basslines, icky keyboards and chiming guitar strings, and Tom’s half-talking, half singing of the sometimes eerie, sometimes cryptic lyrics, telling stories of characters haunted and tormented by their own demons. ‘Harry The Morgue’, for example, is the compelling story of a mortician who “Collected pro-wrestling magazines/ Fantasized about women suffocating him with polythene,” who is pushed to his own suicide by his own sociopathic tendencies. 

For herein lies the true greatness of Bluebeard’s Room. While the stories may verge on the fantastic, they are all as believable as anything you might read in a tabloid newspaper during a high profile court case. DCW display an almost unearthly grasp on the extremes of the human psyche. Indeed, every track on the album conjures images of an omnipresent terror, emanating from within, like being on suicide watch in a psychiatric ward. In fact, it is easy to imagine that you’re listening to an album recorded by a man teetering right on the edge of sanity. 

Never is this more plain than on ‘My Best Friend’s Going Out With…’, where lines like “It’s been the worst day of my life/ Just hand me the knife,” are dealt with such a deadpan drawl that it sends a sense of alarm straight down the spine, at least until the band’s sense of humour kicks back in with the line “What’s come between us?/ His big, fat cock,” when you realise that if DCW are not arch-ironists of the kind that would make even Morrissey raise a wry eyebrow then they are indeed, darker than Nick Cave during a Scandinavian winter. 

All in all, Bluebeard’s Room is an altogether cracking debut album by a band who have managed to excite and simultaneously unnerve the senses in a way seldom achieved in the present musical climate. Without question, worth your hard-earned cash for. - Steve Gislam