Album Review : The Super Vacations - Thicker Milk
- Written by Kenneth McMurtrie
Being let down following the big build up of a band's new release seems to be an occurrence of increasing frequency these days. The Super Vacations, unfortunately for them, do nothing to reverse that trend. In the year that old hands The Coral come up with a career defining album, anyone else trading in anything even vaguely resembling Sixties psych, or garage at the lighter end of the scale, has a tough job on their hands already - but even without that benchmark being set these guys were never onto a winner.
Alarm bells should maybe have rung when it became known that Thicker Milk sported 21 songs. Such an amount tends though to lead you down the path of thinking that even if only 50 percent is really good and the rest of medium quality then you're still ahead. Couple that with a description that pitches them at Kinks, 13th Floor Elevators & Guided By Voices fans and you would really think you had lucked in to the best sort of musical LSD.
Not so. Opener 'Moss' comes on like a Lovvers reject and is over before it even starts to get anywhere. 'Ten Second Freak Out' isn't one although it does sound a bit like a half-baked Sonic Youth effort from when they were still in nappies. And from there on it carries on pretty much in the same vein of threadbare and second-rate soundalikes of Bongwater, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Velvet Underground and plenty of others you could guess at and invariably be right.
Taking two years to come up with this shocker was clearly not long enough but it's anyone's guess as to how much longer would be needed to make it anything close to an interesting and enjoyable listening experience, let alone one that was even remotely related to the idea of innovation. Mercifully, for all Thicker Milk's content, it clocks in at under 40 minutes so if you're unlucky enough to have someone force this on you as an introduction to quality music you'll at least not have too long to suffer and you'll know that things can only get better.
