Wax Idols will bring their brand of dark-tinged guitar pop to the Red Museum on June 1. The four-piece from Oakland has been around since 2010 and have released a handful of albums and EPs, establishing a sound that harkens to Siouxsie & The Banshees and early Cure. With a new album, Happy Ending (Etruscan Gold, Inc.), which dropped yesterday, the group heads into darker territories with philosophies and the questions that everyone in the world faces on that inevitable day: death.
Opening up the album, “Heaven Knows” comes thumping in with bass lines and erratic surf guitar licks and asks about what will be on the other side when you hit the six-foot-deep point in the ground. To follow up, “Belong” breaks through with hazy guitar parts that evoke Johnny Marr (Morrissey, The Smiths), which with lead singer Hether Fortune’s vocals, help the create the album’s tone of urgent romanticism.
As the album progresses, the mood swings back and forth with songs such as “Devour” (grievances) and “Ashes” (personal closure), which respectively cover pre- and post-loss. The album’s overall tone works perfectly with post-punk, Goth and surf styles which allow the album to showcase its somber theme of loss, but carries hopeful anecdotes of the next process of grieving.
Wax Idols will play the Red Museum (12 15th St, Sacramento,95814) on June 1 at 7:00 PM. For more information, click here.
Words: Jake Monka.