Dan Wilkie’s sixteen-song album, “MelodyBox,” arrives not with a neat bow but feeling more like an overstuffed cabinet of curiosities flung open by its Shefford-based creator. Wilkie, working solo as a multi-instrumentalist and producer, wrangles virtual instruments and real vulnerability into something uniquely his own, steeped in the melodic hooks of 60s/70s pop but often taking sharp turns down less-travelled, sometimes shadowed paths.
The album map details a profound terrain of overwhelm, a fight against pressures both internal and seismic. You hear it in the interplay between the often bright, Beatle-esque structures and the lyrical weight they carry – a kind of frayed insistence. It speaks of turning towards guiding figures, parents perhaps, yet finding the line crackling with static, heavy with a hopelessness that feels almost baked-in from the start. It’s the sound of confronting difficult truths, not flinching, but living right alongside them. For a moment, the skittering creativity reminds me of those intricate, slightly unsettling diagrams of imagined insects from the Codex Seraphinianus – beautiful, detailed, but hinting at something fundamentally alien just beneath the surface.
Themes of time passing, the residue of loss, and the quiet dread of being forgotten thread through these sixteen tracks, born from Wilkie’s diverse experiences over two decades – love sits next to darker times, nostalgia bumps against a fascination with quirky sounds and pointed edges cultivated since childhood influences like video games. There’s palpable suffering here, yes, a sense of being exposed and burdened, but also fragile moments – a remembered summer, the tending of life – that flicker against the disorientation.
“MelodyBox” doesn’t resolve its considerable anxieties neatly. It’s an ambitious, sometimes exhausting excavation of the self, meticulously built yet leaving the listener amidst its beautiful, complex debris. Does unpacking our inner struggles ever truly leave things tidy?
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