Review:

on 2011-06-01 CharlesMartel Said:

The promise was here, promise that would be fulfilled on their next album. The debut album from the Milltown Brothers, "Slinky", while far from being a classic has a lot to recommend it. In spite of early promise, including a quite remarkable top-ten in the States with "Which Way Should I Jump", the band never seemed to make it much further out from the North Western English fan base which had fostered them and adopted them as their own. While their near contemporaries, the Stone Roses, may have lost out by refusing the move away from the Manchester area in search of wider success, which surely beckoned them, the Milltown Brothers never seemed to have been given the same opportunity.

Unfortunately, the UK pop industry being what it is, as this album did not contain the shake your funky booty lyrics meant that the sheep-like record buying public would overlook both this and the band's excellent second album. How much excellent music has never been made because people are too stupid to look beyond what the record industry tells them is good for them? The Milltown Brothers would provide some academic with a fine example of how the record industry in the UK is a cancerous distortion of the concept of a free market in popular music. The New Musical Express, in the days before it lost its credibility, may have done what it could to create interest, but to the sheep who went out and bought the latest Janet Jackson dross, the NME might as well have been on another planet.

In many ways, the Milltown Brothers were cut from the same mould as the La's, though they had a more developed jangly guitar based pop than the La's. In many ways the band presaged Britpop, but had more substance to it. They took the jangly guitar lines of bands such as the Smiths and filled them out with a lot more substance behind them, instead of relying solely on the guitar. There are timely cameos from a Hammond organ which add body to the songs without becoming overbearing, and all backed up by a solid, yet unassuming rhythm section which held the whole edifice together. If there was anything which served to bring the band down, it was the lack of a Morrissey or a Damon Albarn to serve as a focal point. Without a frontman of some personality, the Milltown Brothers were always going to struggle.

"Which Way Should I Jump?" is an excellent piece of up-tempo pop, while "Here I Stand" is a quietly addictive track, the sort that leaves you humming it for a while afterwards yet being unable to remember what it is or where you heard it. The band departs from the pop theme with "Nationality" - the closest they come to some sort of political stance - but a track which ultimately fails and in some ways lets down the whole album. It lacks any catchy hook lines which made the band's other material stand out and it was overall a more dark and sombre piece of work. Although the band manage to rescue things with a return to the catchy pop hooks later in the album on tracks such as "Sandman" and "Something Cheap", "Nationality" is an unnecessary hiatus which disrupts the flow of the music on the album.

While not a classic, the album has a lot to recommend it. I use the word under-rated a lot, but man this band were sorely under-rated. The public missed out on the Milltown Brothers because of their own prejudices and, regrettable though that is, if the public complain that all they now have are the stupidities of Kylie Minogue and trailer trash like Britney Spears then they only have themselves to blame.
Rating: 6/10