
Milk St. – Baseball
Genre: Garage Rock, Emo, Alternative Rock
Similar artists: Joyce Manor, Mom Jeans, Nirvana, Modern Baseball, Blink-182
If you’re a musician who is willing to put in enough work, you will be able to grow continually and notice even better performances from yourself. But you’ll never be able to sound like you did on your debut. That’s impossible. With that in mind, you can either treasure your effort with all its faults. Or, as most people do, you can just focus on the faults.
Rock music has a lot of things going for it. However, primarily it lives on the engine oil of excitement. A lot of things can be faked, and rock stars make for good actors on stage. But genuine enthusiasm, real fire burning in the belly of artists, is something very hard to counterfeit.
Milk St.’s Baseball is the band’s debut single, and it sounds like it, all loose and excited. You can only capture this feeling and the sound that represents it once, if you’re lucky. The grunge-influenced group managed just that. The fact that little counterproductive thought seems to have been given to the lyrics or instrumentation just adds to the charm. After all, even The Ramones were once true innovators on their debut before needing to be forced to their own formula for the rest of their careers. Milk St. are at the stage where they are inventing themselves.
BLACKWELL – Six Figure Suitor
Genre: Pop Punk
Similar artists: Nirvana, Local H, Starcrawler, Slothrust, Amyl & The Sniffers, IDLES
The hall of rock n’ roll stars is littered with beautiful losers. Most of them, however, are stuck in that category of their own accord. Yes, there are some who genuinely couldn’t help but make a mess of everything as they sprinted through life. But many others loved to convince themselves of untrustworthiness as means to increase their mystique.
Take the famous grunge bands, for example. To the layman, all of the folks from these groups appeared to be angry at themselves and dissatisfied with the world around them. Most of them played well, looked good, and made a lot of money. Were they dishonest? No, they were learning how to portray themselves as perpetual outsiders, as the underdogs.
BLACKWELL’s Six Figure Suitor is a tune cut from the cloth of grunge irony and pessimistic humor. Like the 90s rock bands, however, it doesn’t sacrifice anger for genuinely strong hooks. And while even the singer’s excuses might be best not taken at face value, there is something undoubtedly charming about the struggles described here. Rock stars work the room best when they’re up on top or down on their luck. If they can do both, there’s nothing that they can’t do.