Milk Music.

(Photo by Matt Koroulis on Flickr)

The best new band I’ve discovered this year is Milk Music, from Olympia, WA.

You’ll notice I said “the best”, rather than “my favourite”. Partly just to aid tidy sentence construction, but partly because my belief that this is true extends beyond the usual veil of subjectivity.

Credit where it’s due dept, I picked up on them toward the start of the year following a superlative write-up on Doug Mosurock’s Still Single blog. Since then – via some questionably obtained mp3s - they’ve soundtracked more morning/evening journeys than anything else on record. They just hit that perfect headspace for preparing for another fucking day at work, I suppose. Like much good rock music, their sound speaks of facing up to the crap and ploughing through it. Then having a smoke as all lies in ruins before you. Not that I either smoke or reduce things to ruins on a daily basis, but y’know what I mean.

The essence of what Milk Music does can be dissembled into its constituent parts without much effort;

Propulsive drive and dead-eyed-stare quality comes straight from The Wipers.

Emotionally engaged, riff-heavy song-writing is pure early Dinosaur / late Huskers.

Monster guitar tone via Zeke/Black Flag.

Nothing new under the sun of course, but currently the particular way in which this group slam this stuff together feels like a revelation. Or a sobering punch in the tummy, at least. Milk Music are pretty young guys too (I think?), and ply their wares with the kind of gut level brutality that young guys traditionally should. That’s pretty crucial, I feel.

Ask the man on the street and he’d probably tell you it sounds like grunge. But as Sid Vicious famously put it in a rare moment of insight, “I’ve met the man on the street and he’s a cunt”. We all know where the good shit was at before the media came up with that label, and so do Milk Music. Hey guess what, it’s still there. Rock Music, I believe it’s called.

In fact, all you 80s/90s Proper Rock veterans, moaning about how the kids today just aren’t making music as uncompromisingly bad-ass as they did before you got old and the internet turned up and spoiled everything: get a clue and leap the generation gap – you have a new favourite band at last, and they probably hate websites just as much as you do.

Their six song 12” ‘Beyond Life’ is beyond good, and you can get in touch with the Perennial Death label to see whether they’ve still got a hard copy left to ship to where you live.

I enjoyed capitalising the phrase Rock Music earlier in this post, so let’s nail our flag to the mast and say that this is the Best American Rock Record in recent memory. The recording isn’t flashy, but it’s not murky either. It’s just right. The guitar is mixed at *the right level*, and long-term readers will know what that means. One day maybe I’ll speak to the bass player, and ask him how it feels having his tone entirely swallowed by his buddy’s low end. And assuming he doesn’t think I’m attempting a crude euphemism and punch me, we can hopefully at least come to an agreement that he’s always there in the background, doing good work.

Here’s a soundcloud of the 12”s title track;



And whilst you’re waiting for that to arrive in the post, you can enjoy the rougher but even louder session that they did for Brian Turner’s WFMU show, with a couple of tunes off the record and a whole bunch of other ones. ‘Thrashing in the Unknown’ in particular is a burnin’ monster, to utilise the same terminology employed by the band in the interview segment in reference to David Crosby’s ‘Almost Cut My Hair’.

Here it is, all free to stream/dl:

What else to say? I dunno. Milk Music have a shitty name, but they’re one hell of a band. As I get older, I’ve noticed my body is becoming less tolerant of the rigours of regularly attending what you Americans call ‘punk shows’, so you can take it as quite the compliment when I say that being stuck in an unventilated basement with a bunch of random maniacs, Milk Music, a cheap vocal PA and a set of full stacks is about the closest thing to paradise I can imagine right now. Oof.

Labels: I like, Milk Music