Entertainment + Culture Coverage of Independent Media from CLT & Beyond

If one were to chronical the time period we’re living in now, especially within the Charlotte region, it’s both a time of anxiety, patience, and meditation. Wherever you look online with many of our area’s artists, day and night you’ll find that struggle being channeled through live stream concerts, pop-up sessions, and in general a subtle tempering, laid bare by the need to better understand how as a community we can help one another. For our musicians, that need still breeds the creative impulse, and the band Wilma will not go down without a fight, even as they reach into the darker fuel with “Rot Master”, one of the pieces to be brought up to the light during 2020’s quarantine period.

Marking this track as their second 2020 single release, the night & day difference between “Alien” and “Rot” is staggering. The brothers Matthew & Viky Leone crank up the ongoing riffs, choosing to go heavier with a display of attitude that fits together incredibly well with “rot” in its lyrics, even going so far as completely cutting down to two verses, ending out with “Decay Rot Away!” to drive the overhanging message home. DJ Buchanan heeds the call and matches with devastating claps of thunder as he’s allowed all of his power at the drum’s helm. The trio wanted to drive home a message with this track, and in order to do it they had to reach to the height of their powers to seize this moment.

Like with “Alien”, “Rot” is an over the brim explosion in personifying its subject. In what Wilma speaks in, Matthew taking the brunt of the vocals this time and Viky morphing himself into the overarching figure at the end of each set of verses, overcoming the “rot” of depression, along with other negative tendencies that “never see the light”. The lyrics pits the band between themselves and that looming cloud in the personified clash in the two lyric sets, afterwards going lighter on the instrumentals to show a bit of a conclusion to the battle, before slamming in one last time to the climax, the fight seemingly done for now. This track’s release is amply timed for where we are now as a people, and that hidden positivity in the clashes also tells us they’re going to be ok, and so are we.

It’s easy to find a blanket of dark energy to hide under, especially now, but let this track sink in as Wilma’s collective freshman spirit reaffirms you that there is a dawn even after the sun goes down. As well, we can all be thankful that the brothers live under one roof, so hopefully after we can reemerge from our homes, their meditations will bring something massive for the duration of 2020, one of our strangest years on record.

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