This lot’s disdain for the basic syntax of being in a band extends from not bothering to name their songs to calling their Bandcamp page bandcampsucks.bandcamp.com.

They didn’t even bother giving their EP a name, nor even breaking it up into individual songs on the aforementioned Bandcamp page, choosing instead to simply fire up a single twelve-minute song called This is the Whole EP, Fuck You.

So all I really had to go on when trying to find out who these guys were, after their songs had been kicking around my inbox for a month or two was a single word: Milkshakes.  Now, fortunately, it appears that is one of the few terms for which even a Google image search can’t find porn, but neither could a regular search find the band – there are, it seems, a few Milkshakey bands out there.  Eventually, it took a Twitter query, swiftly answered by DC from The Waiting Room, to find them, so the hive mind does appear to have some benefits.

I don’t know if the band are specifically trying to make a point with all this posturing, but it did make me laugh, and definitely put me in a good mood to actually listen to the music.  Yeah right lads, fuck off yourselves!

Except for the last song, the tunes are all short, sharp, all over the place, a mess of distorted, sloppy guitars, spanked drums and yelled vocals.  Aesthetically they take a lot from punk, a lot from the current lo-fi fad and bits and pieces from most other forms of raucous guitar pop inbetween, but the results are fucking ace.

The songs spend more time being kicked than they do stretching their legs, but that gives the pop moments a little more glimmer, as and when they manage to fight their way to the surface. A lot this is abrupt, stop-start stuff, with loose time signatures and drums played like fucking artillery, giving it a jarring, confrontational feel, none more so than on the last song, which sound like an engine that won’t quite start but nevertheless manages to be one of the best songs on the EP.

I can’t really decide how tongue in cheek this whole business is.  If this lot are taking themselves entirely seriously then they might just be a bunch of muppets, but if they are just taking the piss then it kind of ruins things a bit too, because I like my fuck offs to have some proper spite behind them.  So I am happy with the ambiguity, now that I have eventually managed to track them down, because it keeps things fun without taking the sting out of it.

Milkshakes – Track 03

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This is called the Fullcast for no better reason than that I tried to fit far too many songs onto the playlist.  I’d have used half the Palmist Records stable if possible, but eventually decided to settle for one single track.  There’s always next week.

I didn’t even make room for a song from the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record, although to be fair I haven’t really listened to that enough to actually know what I think about it, so maybe that would have been hasty.

If anything this reminded me of the really early podcasts, when I tried to squish two hours of music into a single recording, and the things were just sprawling behemoths of wittering and tuneage.  I can’t say I regret the decision to trim it down to either ten songs or an hour.

Direct download: Toadcast #191 – The Fullcast

01. Beaters – Dark Haunter (00.22)
02. Body Wash – Cool Bike (06.34)
03. High Pop – For Jord (08.23)
04. Django Django – Waveforms (11.35)
05. Steven Malkmus & the Jicks – No One Is (As I Are Be) (17.31)
06. Milkshakes – Track 1 (24.57)
07. Kurt Vile – The Creature (27.37)
08. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons – Don’t Turn Your Back on Love (34.41)
09. Steel Phantoms – Bedouin (41.50)
10. Eagulls – Possessed (47.24)
11. Sands – Fares & Tolls (53.15)
12. U2 – Lemon (60.17)