Milk Jr.
Rap Music
(Dust House, 2015)
Milk Jr. doesn’t make funny music; it’s stuff that would probably distress your mom if she heard it muffled through your closed bedroom door, a Little Rascals soapbox car of shredded fuzz, oily sarcasm, guitar barbs, and Animal-manic percussion rattling down the road on the verge of exploding at every hill and turn. But it’s the furthest thing from self-serious. Toss Los Campesinos! into a vat of acid or lock Weezer in a dungeon and you have got some context, at least. The Oklahoma City act is so headstrong in its commitment to having a fun time with dark stuff, I’m surprised it didn’t go with Chocolate Milk Jr. instead.
That often comes to light in surface details. The cover art is centered around something of a poor man’s Sacred Bones imprint; a fitting choice given the band’s penchant for demented, muddy pop music. But Milk Jr. has a sense of humor about itself that few artists on that lauded label share. I mean, hell, they called the distortion-heavy six-song punk fever dream Rap Music, cheekily titled their twisted, noisy opener “Rain Drops Keep Falling On My Head” (soft-pop B.J. Thomas song this is not) and there’s a song — honest to god — bequeathed the name “Take Five, by The Jackson 5, by Milk Jr.”
There’s a silly, math-rock-dork vibe to those choices, and there’s a tinge of that manifested in the music, at least to a higher degree than their debut, Bad Things Don’t Happen to Bad People, possessed. Largely, though, it’s the same noisy antics we’ve heard before, cranking out arena-rock guitar riffs in the comfort of a small, dank basement. The songwriting has mostly leveled — neither a leap above Bad Things, but no slip, either — shifting some of the band’s lovable fury toward sharper hooks, a tradeoff that one would hope doesn’t come at the cost of subtraction (as the twitchy “Art is Tyt” goes on to show). The audio quality does make a jump, however, and though the lo-fi feel suits the chaos, the more contained recording does alleviate any sense of the storm escaping their control.
Opener “Rain Drops” is the best example of this, flexing its muscle without going full-on ‘roid rage. The breakdowns following each verse and the bridge feel inventive, too, summoning pastel afrobeat and delivering it in a dark, devilish little package. “Take Five” is bent out of shape a bit by a heavy prog-groove that throws its center of balance, a line that “Post Vacation Depression” walks more gracefully.
But Milk Jr. is still a very young band, and it’s one that is exciting as about anyone around these parts. About every shade of noise rock has been claimed, but the band is splashing around violently enough to threaten to find a new one of its very own.
