Merchandise and Milk Music are more similar than you'd think. After all, Legs McNeil, the man who coined the term "punk" described it as being "obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, [and] ironic", things that both Milk Music and Merchandise display. Sure, Milk Music play like the SST bands of the 80's with some Neil Young thrown in, and Merchandise come from punk roots, but play like new wave bands like The Cure and The Smiths. But the term punk didn't apply just to music, back when Legs coined it, it applied to the people as well. It's something like an aesthetic.
Let's start with Milk Music. They hail from Olympia, and their excellent debut EP, Beyond Living was released three years ago. Upon that initial release, the band garnered comparisons to Dinosaur Jr. and Husker Du. But in an interview, guitarist Charles Waring said that main songwriter Alex Coxen didn't like these comparisons, even though he is a Dinosaur Jr. fan.
Got that? Good, because we're moving onto the album now.
Cruise Your Illusion is a 12 song, 42 minute long album (maybe also a play on Guns n Roses' Use Your Illusion?) and it's... awesome. Sure, it has it's ups and downs, which I will get into soon, but as a whole, Cruise Your Illusion is a fun and well written indie rock record. Also, Alex Coxen is an unsung genius, when it comes to the fact that he's written all the songs himself, and put them through what Waring calls the "Milk Music machine".
The album starts off with "Caged Dogs Run Wild" (hey! that's the title of this review!) a minute long rock instrumental with some tinges of country added. The first real song on the album, "Illegal and Free", which sounds like a (pained) mission statement from the band. I say this because of the contrast in the lyrics. Coxen and his friends get high, and run from cops, but this is because of "a world that keeps turning on" them.
Alex Coxen is definitely the driving force of Milk Music. Atop the guitar fuzz, is his voice, cracking and howling along. I can't really think of another singer who sings like him, his singing style is truly unique. It helps that Coxen writes great lyrics. He lives in his own world (or maybe just Olympia), and steals cars, has friends who steal from your kids, gets blown around by "the joker wind" and hangs on falling stars. On "No, Nothing, My Shelter" he listens to the King and Hendrix when he's got the blues.
Coxen also seems to be singing of escape on this record. On "Crosstown Wanderer" he paints a picture of some one who wanders from town to town, and on "Runaway" the wind takes him to the road outside, the one he's always wondered about. In "No, Nothing, My Shelter", there's the revealing lyric, "No, nothing is your home".
Of course, not all the songs are fleshed out completely. "Crosstown Wanderer" is two minutes of post Dinosaur Jr. reunion guitar riffs, before it ends abruptly, and "Dogchild" shapes up to be an interesting take on a country ballad, but than descends into a three minute drone.
But the one song that could make up for all of this, is the closer, "The Final Scene". An eight minute doo wop-esque punk epic. Everything the band does on this song is on point, from the interplay between the two guitars, Coxen's lyrics, and the backing vocals (some surprising "sha-las", "ooohhhs", and "whoa-ohs!").
Merchandise represent a different kind of punk than Milk Music, a type that hasn't been recreated like the SST days, or any indie band from the 90's. Merchandise sound like a post punk, new wave band from Britain in the 80's. Straight out of Manchester. Lead singer Carson Cox's voice falls somewhere between Morrisey and Robert Smith. But he's less dramatic than Robert Smith, and much easier to take seriously than Morrisey. They hail from Tampa, Fl. and emerged from the underground punk scene of the city.
Their newest album, Totale Nite, has been released less than a year later from their excellent 2012 album, Children of Desire. Totale Nite was also supposed to be an EP, but I guess it's not... anymore. It has six tracks, all but one surpassing the six minute mark, and it feels much more cohesive than an EP would.
The album starts off with "Who Are You", which begins with a snarling harmonica, and Cox singing "today the sun rose / like the hand of God". The album then moves to "Anxiety's Door", possibly Merchandise's best song of their whole discography (only rivaled by "Time"). In this song Cox wanders the streets of Tampa, where "old men sleep in the road" and he "drinks the perfumed air", these lyrics evoking excellent imagery.
The album than goes to the sort of ballad of "I'll Be Gone", a beautiful slow song that lasts for a glorious six minutes and thirty six seconds, with Cox promising to "plant [himself] in the sun, just to be free from all you motherfuckers". But than there's the title track. It's not the best Merchandise song, but it's certainly the most experimental, moving from near dissonance in the verses to one of the most catchy and melodic choruses. The album than ends with another killer song, "Winter's Dream", which is the most emotionally potent song on the album. It may be about a man's death, with Cox singing "the greatest joy I've ever felt / was killing him". Or maybe it's a version of himself, with Cox saying "I'd rather kill myself than to be someone else". He than repeats the same line, "I knew his name", until the song descends into forty seconds of Metal Machine Music style noise.
And what would Merchandise be without the instrumentation? The beautiful guitar sounds on "Anxiety's Door" and the almost frightening ones on "Total Nite". "Total Nite" also contains a sax, sounding like the Stooges, circa Funhouse.
Milk Music and Merchandise both hold a unique place in the ever growing punk spectrum that contains Parquet Courts, White Lung, Japandroids, The Men, Metz and countless others. When I try to explain these kinds of bands to those who are older than I, I like to cite them as our Dinosaur Jr. or Sonic Youth of our generation. So for all the kids who wish they wore born 1975, so they'd be 13 years old when Daydream Nation and Bug were released and 16 when Loveless was released, pick up these two albums, and listen to these "Caged Dogs Run Wild".
Milk Music - Cruise Your Illusion
8.5/10
Recommended Tracks - "Illegal and Free", "No, Nothing, My Shelter", "Lacey's Secret", "Runaway", "The Final Scene"
Merchandise - Totale Nite
9/10
Recommended Tracks - Um... all of them (there's only five anyway).