WARMER MILKS - Soft Walks 2LP

"...Let’s just say that the year is 2003, and we’re finally meeting the protagonist of this story, a young aspiring post-post-post-punk musician playing guitar (and burning CDRs) in his suburban Kentucky bedroom.

Born Michael Andrew Turner, he will cycle through a series of punk names (all gates open), the informal (Mikey Turner), the literary (M.A. Turner), the androgynous (Ma Turner), the mystical (Mazozma).

Thanks to the internet, his musical practice can now easily be influenced by, let’s say, the American and European avant-garde theater of the 1950s, the global avant-psychedelic rock underground of the late 1960s, the singer-songwriter outlaw country of the 1970s, the hardcore punk of the 1980s, and from the 1990s both the Lollapaloozoid MTV grunge iceberg tip (with the punk/indie underground massive beneath the water) and the weirdo Bananafishfood noise from San Francisco and Japan and Europe and everywhere else.

Not only that, he can start his own band that plays music influenced by all of those things all at once, make prolific recordings of said music, and send it all right back onto the internet to create a living subcultural feedback loop.

Mikey has indeed done all of that, and is still doing it, non-stop for almost 20 years now, but he did it first in 2003 with a band he called Warmer Milks, a strange and powerful little combo formed in the college town of Lexington, Kentucky. I think a band like Warmer Milks could only have been possible in the 2000s, and in a place like Lexington. Away from the economic pressure and scenester conformity of the coastal media centers, yet still with full access to the entire world of the internet, people in such a place have the potential to be as artistically free as you can get under late capitalism.

Just check out Lexington bands from the period like Hair Police, Eyes and Arms of Smoke, Cadaver in Drag, Ara, Jovontaes, and Jeanne Vomit-Terror. All pretty damn weird and creative, but my vote for weirdest of them all, and in the most varied and fascinating ways at once, is Warmer Milks."