Mostly No

Following their 2011 debut, Yucca, by only a year, Milk Maid's Mostly No walks a constant line between obscuring bandleader Martin Cohen's pop-friendly bedroom garage melodies and bringing them into the forefront. Though assisted by a crew of various drummers and auxiliary players, Milk Maid is very much Cohen's baby. He wrote all the songs, played most of the instruments, and recorded and mixed the album in his Manchester apartment. The insularity of this process can be immediately felt on the album's kickoff track, "Dopamine." The song's distant, fuzzy vocals and snaky melody bear much in common with Ty Segall's '60s-inspired lo-fi garage pop blasts, swapping out the Lennon worship for a healthy dose of early Small Faces or Texas psych influences. Though the album switches stylistically almost song to song -- from upbeat beach pop on "Do Right" to mellow wandering shoegaze with "Your Neck Around Mine" -- the songs have a solitary character that makes them sound much more like the vision of a single person than any concerted band effort. The constant style-hopping on Mostly No eventually congeals with the two constants of Cohen's lethargic vocal presence and the rainbow of different shades of feedback that touches even the most refined songs on the album, serving as a texture to some while completely burying others. Songs like "Summertime" and "Drag to Find" twist distorted vocals around Jesus and Mary Chain-styled pop forms while the desert ramble of "Pictures of Stone" brings to mind the most strung-out acoustic strums and reverby tambourines of Spacemen 3. Not every song is a keeper, but the strong songs carry the less-engaging moments and Mostly No ultimately becomes a drifty summer soundtrack, with feedback and smoggy guitar tones feeling much like hot pavement or the relentless rays of an August sun. ~ Fred Thomas