Milk Lines – Ceramic
Think In The Red and think speeding guitars and solos. Canadian husband-and-wife team Milk Lines are an altogether more subtle prospect, however, and their varied debut, Ceramic, comes off the back a solitary single released as a result of being spotted by Fucked Up and after bagging a support slot alongside garage-psyche legends King Khan & The BBQ. That latter point helps explains the bar-room bounce and tumbling, Black Lips riffs of a track like “Lucille”, but not much else on the curious Ceramic.
A particularly tinny jangle and 60s psyche undertow drags the lo-fi collection into more dirge-like melodies in places, opening the door to inevitable Velvet Underground comparisons as well. The crazy capers of the toe-tapping “Suicide Note”, though, are pure porch-dwelling fun, Jeffrey Clarke and Emily Frances’s cutesy duet coming on like White Stripes circa White Blood Cells. At the other end of the spectrum, Clarke goes full creaky, county holler on the garage-psyche romp “Crib Death”.
When Frances is allowed the limelight on the other hand, such as on “Purgatory”, she adopts an angelic, if disinterested, dream-pop stance that allows the album’s scraped strings and weirder outliers to pass on through without snagging at the whole’s comfortable fabric. All the same, in the main, these are deceptively simple songs, be them scrappy indie or high-and-lonesome pyschedelics, pulled along by tight, red-eyed melodies. Swelling together it’s easy to get pulled along with them, too. Go with the flow, as they say.
Best track: “Another Breed”
~Ceramic is released December 11th 2015 via In The Red.~