(album, Suffering Jukebox/FatCat)
This debut set from a quartet fronted by Nine Black Alps bassist Martin Cohen is an exercise in deliberately defenestrated melody, recorded in glorious lo-fi at his Manchester flat. The deliberately basic production serves to imbue his often head-swimmingly sweet songs with pleasantly jagged edges, resulting in an engaging, largely bittersweet corpus of songs.
The lo-fi production also enables a sense of Ramonic minimalism, as in opener ‘Such Fun’, a track which establishes the template of matching simple yet intelligent lyrics against rough-hewn melody, and in this instance, tops the confection off with some effective two-note soloing. ‘Can’t You See’ extends the motif of serrated pop to emerge sounding like So Alone era Johnny Thunders on a particularly lucid day.
The bedroom knob-twiddling is particularly evident at the opening of ‘Oh!’ as the recording level is turned up to amplify a track that occupies a kind of Barrettesque whimsical dreamland, but here is planted – in part – in grim reality by lyrics that recall the emotive power of Dan Treacy. ‘Dead Wrong’ sees Yucca blossom into a twisted-yet-addictive bloom comprised of sumptuous defenestrated melodies. This, along with the vandalised powerpop of recent single ‘Not Me’ are the album’s standout tracks – both bearing some relation to the kind of tortured beauty that became synonymous with the Jesus and Mary Chain.
Along with the subsequent ‘Same As What’, ‘Girl’ marks one of two points at which the album gets a little folky, it being a love song reminiscent of REM at their least unbearable that also taps into some Byrds influences. By way of contrast, the brief ‘Kill Me Again’ sounds for all the world like Freddie and The Dreamers have been mixing goof balls with horse tranquilisers.
‘Back of Your Knees’ is Yucca’s most expansive track – providing a stratospheric sense of being buffeted by successive waves of distorted guitar and harmonic vocals that are both evocative and affecting. The number is also embellished by a truly nasty sounding low-end bridge section. Equally vibrant is ‘Sad Song’, an exercise in battered bubblegum bedroom glam economy that’s more ‘bang a friend’ than ‘bang a gong’.
Milk Maid sign off with ‘Someone You Thought You’d Forgot’ – a mournful and haunting lullaby from bedsit land that brings this engaging album to a logical conclusion.
To order Yucca direct, click HERE
Originally posted 2011-06-22 08:53:15. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
