Milky Wimpshake - My Funny Social Crime Album Review

Putting the word 'Funny' in your album title is always risky business, as it opens you right up for a whole bunch of criticism if it turns out that your album isn't funny in the slightest. My Funny Social Crime falls foul of this, and goes as far as to dabble across the line where things go from 'just not funny' to 'annoying'.

Since Britpop struck, with its sarcasm laced lyrical content and its quite frankly bored sounding singers; it seems to have become OK for bands to get singers who simply cannot sing. That is the case with Milky Wimpshake. The off key, lazy vocals are nothing more than a distraction from the music at best (Patchwork, a musically interesting song), and at worst they are enough to make you hit the stop button. Over and over again. With your face. Until the music stops and your face and CD player are transformed into a bloody mess of wreckage. This happens a number of times throughout the album, but most notably during Fuck the Rules and Eyeball to Eyeball.

Sadly it isn't just the vocals that are poor and lazy; the lyrics themselves are for the most part, just stupid. Take this dreadful couplet from Broken Again, a charming enough piece of music, ruined by poor vocals and crap lyrics: "people cross the street to avoid me/or maybe I'm just thinking paranoidly" a couplet which arguably should have been left on the rehearsal room floor. Another example from the opening track Alice Nebulae which doesn't even fit the rhythm of the song "but her boss uses oil/so the sea is destroyed"

Despite all of these things, My Funny Social Crime is not completely charmless (although it does do a good job of convincing you that it is). Songs like Itchy Feet on a Tuesday Night, Patchwork and Thursday have some great musical ideas, and with the right vocalist, could have been some great indie pop songs. Sadly, the vocals are just too much of a distraction to let slide.

Ben Walton