- I tend to perceive the world of music as a web of artists, laced together by the strands of their influences, pulling them all inexorably closer to each other. It’s very rare for an artist, a band, to stand so far out on the fringe that you can’t immediately find a big old handful of those strands, webbing their way back to a whole mess of other artists. Melbourne’s Mildlife, certainly, do not have that problem. The situation with them is the exact opposite: they stand right in the centre of a forest of those strands, so thickly bunched that it becomes nearly impossible to separate them and pick out the individual connections.
They had a big song at the end of 2017, less than modestly titled, The Magnificent Moon’s eight-and-a-half minutes radiated a colour-burst of sounds. From the synthwave / krautrock arpeggiation that rolls in with the ghostly wind samples, to the gently funky disco drumming, to the jazzy precision of the improvisation, to the downbeat soul-pop vocal, to the overweeningly clever prog-rock architecture, to the weird psychedelic reverb miasma that envelops everything they do...somewhere in said cloud I’m sure the list goes on. It’s clear that that the quartet of James Donald, Adam Halliwell, Kevin McDowell and Tom Shanahan have developed a very big stylistic playbook. They’ve spent a long time putting it together: I don’t know exactly when they started but I can tell you they do have a Myspace page out there, gathering dust, which should give you some idea of the band’s vintage. The last time I remember hearing them -a single called Milk & Honey they released back in 2011- I think they sounded more like the zany art-pop of Animal Collective. While I can see how you get from there to here, well, it’s quite a journey.
Where exactly is here, anyway? Between the giant poles of psych and disco and jazz fusion and kraut, their musical electricity crackles wildly, zapping so many different choices, it’s hard to think of any one artist that combines enough different styles to be described as really being like them. There are some imperfect comparisons, I suppose. The huge lashings of bittersweet, jazzy mood, set to the propulsive beat of The Magnificient Moon, initially put me in mind of those similarly huge, Scandinavian quasi-jazzers Jaga Jazzist. Although the whole, lush disco-pop thing? Obviously LCD Soundsystem and half the DFA roster were never going to be far behind. What about recent Aussie influences, like the electro-boogie of GL or the psych-dance of Jagwar Ma? Then there are all those other times where it either sounds like CAN or late Miles Davis. I think the takeaway from this is that if there’s something out there that fuses groovily, then sooner or later Mildlife are going to sound like it.
I hear that Mildlife took a year out from playing live to learn how to play their studio wonders outside of the recording booth. Honestly, to listen to their new ‘album’, the six gargantuan cuts that make up Phase, it does not sound that way. If anything I would have assumed the opposite: quite a lot of the songs on Phase sound less like songs and more like arbitrary track dividers were nailed into an expansive jam session. Many of the genres the quartet are into -psych, kraut, jazz, disco even- lend themselves to vamping and great big tracts of improvised space. The band really take advantage of that on Phase and they clearly have a wealth of talent, live, but they can also be quite self-indulgent too. Every now and then the improv here gets lost in itself, forgetting that it’s in service to songcraft and not the other way round.
I get the feeling -accurate or not- that The Magnificent Moon might have started as a standalone, which became a runaway winner and … oh crap we have to put an album together to go with it! Perhaps that’s where the filler feeling comes from? It’s hard, after the eight-minute-feels-like-two sugar-rush of that single, but you really need to let yourself sink into the slow-burn of the rest of Phase and find the sometimes hidden qualities of this complex band. It’s worth it because, whether you take it fast or slow, there’s a lot to recommend Mildlife; like, an almost overwhelming amount. I’d say take it in small bites, but that’s definitely impossible. So, wrap your ears around it and think about consequences later.
- Chris Cobcroft.