Remember back in high school when all the kids who could play instruments eventually began to break down into smaller subsets with the idea of starting bands together? If you looked around, you'd see four guys who all happened to like Neil Young congregate at the same table in the cafeteria and eventually start jamming together after school (or sometimes at lunch), then the punk band and the four guys who could play Beatles songs the best would start their outfits too. Eventually (if they were lucky), they'd play a couple of shows a month. At a certain age, that was just the societal norm in high school; but there were always four guys who ended up getting sort of left out or left behind. Sometimes they were sort of left in limbo because, while they were really good players, they didn't really have a sound or inspiration which spurred imaginations – so they'd end up playing really, really extended jam versions of Pink Floyd or Cream covers which eventually just sort of turned to static. It was unfortunately to see such a thing happen, but that's just how it was.
Those who wondered whatever became of those guys (there was a group of them in every high school graduating class through the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties) should check out Milk Music – who just released their debut full-length album, Cruise Your Illusion, on Fat Possum Records.
After a quick look at the album's cover art (which looks a bit like a Curt Kirkwood pencil sketch done for an unreleased Meat Puppets album), listeners will notice that not a heck of a lot has changed for these guys since they were nervously plucking out the notes of “Fearless” or raging out “Another Brick In The Wall” in high school. After an original instrumental here (“Caged Days Run Wild” – which does not live up to its name), Milk Music shuffles lazily into “Illegal And Free” and sets the tone for the entire duration of Cruise Your Illusion; fuzzy, mid-tempo guitars play loosely and with a certain familiar uncertainty before singer Alex Coxen picks up on the uncertain vibes of the guitar, starts singing, and lets his own voice trail off at the end of each stanza, in sympathetic relief of the guitars. “Illegal And Free” actually sounds like it could have been recorded during some band's performance at an open mic night because of that ramshackle vocal delivery, and the ooey-gooey nature of the guitar sound on the song, but it doesn't help either that, at five minutes and twenty seconds long, “Illegal And Free” is almost exactly two minutes longer than it needs to be; that it just keeps going on and on implies that the band clearly has no idea how to end this monster, and it just gets boring.
All of the things which were wrong with “Illegal And Free” continue to manifest as Cruise Your Illusion as the record continues and, even when a song looks like it might have a shot at breaking through, one of those elements tanks it. The Cream-meets-Dinosaur Jr. tone of both “New Lease On Love” and “Cruising With God” gets hamstrung hard by Coxen's total inability to sing, for example, while a really bad bar band shuffle does “Crosstown Wanderer” and “Runaway" in. As if that weren't enough, poor performance and writing in tandem shoots most of the rest of the record (but especially “Dogchild”) in the face; all the way through this run-time, something invariably goes very, very wrong with each song and it's so noticeable that it would be laughable, if it wasn't such a joke.
So, simply, Cruise Your Illusion is bad – but someone, somewhere has to be wondering if it's so bad that it places Milk Music beyond redemption. Even the hard-boiled critic in me doesn't want to say that there is no hope for this band though; true, Cruise your Illusion is awful, but the optimist in me wants to say that Milk Music could turn this horrible mess they've started with around. Only time and another album will tell if that's true though.
Artist:
www.milkmusic.us/
www.myspace.com/magicmilkymusic
www.facebook.com/pages/MILK-MUSIC/
Download:
Milk Music – Cruise Your Illusion – "I've Got A Wild Feeling" – [mp3]
Album:
Cruise Your Illusion is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
