Album Review: Milk Music - Cruise Your Illusion

Cruise Your Illusion marks Milk Music's first foray into the realm of album-length releases. Following the considerable interest built with their six-track debut EP, Beyond Living, the Washington-based quartet holed up in their smalltown shared home of Olympia, at High Command studios, to bash out the follow-up.

Recorded to four-track, 1/2” tape, the band limited themselves with their tracking capabilities, setting themselves the challenge of getting the bulk of the music down live as a band. What results is a warm and engrossing fuzz, an enviably perfect mix for this brand of muddy grunge-inspired bop rock and slacker pop with a liberal smattering of striding throwback guitar solos.

At its best, when the care-free riffs stretch into infinity – as on Illegal And Free, No, Nothing, My Shelter, and closer, The Final Scene – you could be forgiven for thinking on Cruise Your Illusion Milk Music dabble only in pleasantly melancholic songs, frontman Alex Coxan's distanced drawl, vaguely melodic and entirely intriguing, certainly aiding such an opinion. But the band don't shy away from a grumpier, and admittedly less lazy aggression on the likes of New Lease On Love and Cruising With God, Coxan howling the latter, “Welcome to the real fucking world, brother!” They're similarly at open on attention deficit slacker-by-numbers number, I've Got A Wild Feeling.

Cruise Your Illusion is a damn good cruising soundtrack, laidback and capable of washing over you in what seems like an endless haze.