Milan W. - Leave Another Day

Milan Warmoeskerkenerken’s “Leave Another Day” sailed across the Atlantic to sprinkle Belgian salt in my bed, twice before I even got up. I let the album play a third time. Something was happening. Something I wasn’t ready to name. Two silhouettes began to shimmer at the edge of my consciousness, catching fractured light from the safety of shadows. That night, as I reached for sleep, the tide came back, this time with sound. It surged toward me, a warm saline wave that whispered an indistinguishable melody, swelled into shape, and folded around me like a second skin.

The opener, “I Wait,” rises almost to the thighs, guitar picking and dusty record-player static lapping gently across the skin. It sets up like '60s folk but moves with a quieter intention. The title becomes mantra. The singer waits. We wait. I watch from the knee-deep water as the album characters emerge from the rocky contours on the beach: two adult children, half in love, half afraid, facing each other in the hush of a midnight tryst. The game begins.

Track two, “All the Way,” breaks the surface with a pulsing bass and cold, steel guitar. We’ve left the '60s, skipped the '70s entirely, and fallen into the lush, haunted glam of the '80s. He pleads with her to go all the way, his voice dark-lined and hungry. This poor goth girl — overcommitted and under-defended — begins to sway. She considers him. That’s all he needs. He smells the crack in her armor and pushes forward.

Torn between the love she already has and the romantic love our singer offers: it’s too much for her. Track three catches him mid-push, hesitating. “Do I even want to be with someone?” he asks. The persona flips, the tone retreats, and he banishes her with a wave of the hand, but the gesture trembles with bluff. She’s in his bloodstream now.

“Wanda” brings us deep into an instrumental love connection, hot and heavy with breath and pulsating blood, rushing to reach every capillary. This exhilaration evokes a warning. She has given in to his persistence. “Days in My Arms” is the reward: both his and her eyeliner smeared in mutual surrender. They exit his bedroom for a moment to walk the boulevard below his apartment. Rather than step on the cobblestones, halfway through the track, the most gorgeous melody swells as the two float above the stoney street, with the guitar and bass conversing back and forth in play and angst. It’s barely two minutes long, but it’s the jewel of the record, the memory you keep replaying in the aftermath.

But euphoria curdles quickly. “Ballad” returns us to his original wound. A saxophone winds around the question: “Do you want to be with me?” She won’t say yes. She won’t say no. It’s maddening that this girl can’t make up her damn mind, but this guy’s need for therapy to work on his attachment style is overt. He’s not in love: he’s in a trap of his own making. “Interlude” offers a breath. Themes echo. The two pull apart, perhaps just long enough to see themselves clearly.

In “The Healing,” he declares, “Never again.” But nobody believes it. He toasts to clarity, to detachment, to self-preservation, and promptly walks into the next emotional ambush. This is the album’s most gorgeous contradiction: a song that aches with conviction and quivers with relapse. The next two tracks deepen that tension before we arrive at the instrumental “Blue Heron.” The heron, a solitary sentinel, perfectly capable of flying away, waits, knee-deep in freezing water, just in case the fish circles back around his spindly legs. They hover in that tension for what feels like hours, until hunger curdles into resentment. The heron strikes: “Did you really think you were the one?” The subsequent track echoes this moment with heavy, dreamlike guitar plucking, beautiful and bitter at once.

The closing title track breaks like a plea. He begs her not for love, but for delay. Just one more night. One more breath in her presence. One more hour pretending they’re still inside that floating moment. But the tide knows when to pull back, and I’m left standing where I began — soaked, cold, offshore — wishing I could draw the lovers together, stitch up the childhood wounds that forced them apart, and crawl back inside the euphoria of “Days in My Arms. There’s no fixing what the body remembers, so I give in to his plea and let her stay another day. I replay track five, close my eyes, and let the swell of the two-minute mark drag me back underwater, knowing full well this momentary bliss is worth the pain of drowning.