Good storytelling is intoxicatingly involved with conviction. Allegories that depend on the belief in the unbelievable (love, rumours, death, magic) will inevitably weigh heavily on the voice of the author if the audience is going to accept what’s being offered to them. Fortunately, Wax Mannequin’s inventions are boundlessly enthralling—No Safe Home is planted on the passive persuasion of its own isolated lore. Mobbing paranoia exists with as much tangibility and elemental importance as the earth and it’s weathering. Wax’s control over the world he sees is in his arduous understanding of the nature of things; the fluidity in which he broaches the seen and the felt with equal and frank attention. Though No Safe Home is fairly stripped down instrumentally, Chris Adeney’s lyrical pacing tip-toes the borders of certainty and delirium in such an enchanting manner that the music at times feels like a delicate accompaniment to his fabulist’s canter. The sentimentality that lies with Wax Mannequin is blended with a quixotically fathomable logic that is at first hard to swallow, but as the music modestly carries every one of Adeney’s words, infallibly full of charactered delivery, its very clear why No Safe Home should hold imaginative tenure as a well-told tale. (It should also be noted as an addendum that no Wax Mannequin album should be held without one of his live performances as reference to any aforementioned conviction; the man has a fire in his eyes that makes only his recorded presence pale and sallow in trite comparison to the impassioned gaze that should accompany it.)
