By 1993, the Dead Milkmen were at an impasse. Their previous record, 1992\u2019s Soul Rotation<\/i> had bombed hard despite being a good disc and the band were dropped by Hollywood. Undeterred, they kept touring and began recording in earnest in a Boston studio. The tapes were shopped around and Hollywood decided to pick it up. Weirdly, they released the album with hardly any kind of promotion: no single, no video, nothing really. <\/p>\n
The result is one of the strangest discs the band ever put out. 28 minutes long with hardly any traces of punk rock to be found. Some diehards love this album and say it\u2019s one of their best; I unfortunately am not one of them. Despite the album being available digitally for a while, I had long wanted to track down a physical copy. Thanks to a fellow fan in a FB group, a pristine copy was sent to me from Texas last week and well\u2026.<\/p>\n
The album\u2019s opening track \u201cLeggo My Ego\u201d is a nice blast of rock to kick off the disc and one\u2019s hopes are up that the whole album will continue along this path. But the next track \u201cI Dream Of Jesus\u201d is a straight knock-off of King Missile and let\u2019s face it even in 1993, we didn\u2019t need two variations of King Missile. Some fans really love this track, but I just cannot get with it and it certainly hasn\u2019t held up 30 years later. <\/p>\n
A lot of the album is sung by guitarist Joe Jack Talcum and that leads to a more melancholic feel than previous records. \u201cNot Crazy\u201d is the perfect example; a great song but not one normally heard on a Milkmen record. Other Joe songs like \u201cNobody Falls Like\u201d and \u201cI Started To Hate You\u201d are more standard tracks that feel right at home for the fans. \u201cLet\u2019s Get The Baby High\u201d on the other hand just sucks. A bad ripoff of Ween with distorted vocals; it\u2019s just the worst and might be one of the all-time lamest songs the band ever did.<\/p>\n
The album\u2019s closing tracks with the best titles, \u201cThe Infant Of Prague Customized My Van\u201d and \u201cThe Woman Who Was Also A Mongoose\u201d are definite highlights as the band experiment with harmonica, tin whistle and some slower melodies. These songs really work and highlight a band that was trying to change things up and not be stuck in a novelty skate punk scene.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, due to lack of any kind of promotion from the label, the record did worse than the previous and the band were sent on their way by Hollywood once and for all. One more album and the band was done by 1995. They later reunited, but this stands as one of the most head-scratching discs in their lauded catalogue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":35058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5826],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-46935","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-dead-milkmen","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46935"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}