Milk Maid – Mostly No
Milk Maid – Mostly No CD (FatCat)
It’s been less than a year since Milk Maid dropped ‘Yucca’, a deeply satisfying debut album that presented vintage rock ‘n’ roll songwriting filtered through a tortured shoegaze haze. In addition to playing those songs on tour night after night for six months or so, Milk Maid main-man Martin Cohen started adding newly composed songs to the mix, letting the band work out the material in a free-form setting. This method allowed Cohen to feel the vibe of each song, to figure out what was working and what wasn’t, to test the structural integrity of the arrangements, to add and delete parts as desired, and to open himself up to new ideas for songs that were put to tape, just Cohen and his guitar, for his ears alone – until now. The glory of Milk Maid is the one-two punch of Cohen’s songwriting – which echoes the inescapably nostalgic heartache of Big Star one moment and the tragic beauty of Elliott Smith the next – and the band’s execution of those songs – which feature a dense layer of fuzzed-out guitars one moment, an emphasis on subtle moments of quiet beauty the next; a momentary wah-drenched guitar solo that isn’t really a guitar solo at all here, a quick-jab percussive breakdown there. When acts like Jesus & Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, and Dandy Warhols are on top of their respective games – when the songs are no-questions-asked straight-up pop songs in all their glory, presented through the deliriously twisted visions of their respective genius ringleaders, awash in soundscapes created by natural instrumentation and the simple interaction of band members rather than by electronic means or studio trickery – they all come close to doing what Milk Maid has done here. Close… but as a whole, in terms of defining a template for the actual sounds contained within the grooves of ‘Mostly No’, bragging rights for the perfection of this particular art form belong to Milk Maid. The Impaler @impalerspeaks
