Exquisite harmonies and faultless guitar work deliver songs of crystaline fragility. The Milk Carton Kids are back!
A new album from the superb Milk Carton Kids is always something of a cause for celebration, here at AUK Towers. There’s something about their music that makes the world seem a better place than it often is. There’s a gentleness to their sound that encourages you to sit back and just let the music wash over you. In fact, the opening track from this new album, and the latest single release, Blue Water, seems the perfect encapsulation of their music and philosophy:
“blue blue water, sparkle in the morning light. blue blue water, smiling up at the sky
blue blue water, singing when the river’s high, drowning out the by-and-by
I know you worry all the time, I know you got my spinning mind
I take it one day at a time, everything will be alright”
It’s a beautiful song that sets up what is, quite simply, a beautiful album, full of craft and high-quality musicality. Throughout the nine tracks that make up the album, the harmonies are exquisite, and the music tumbles along, sounding effortless and deceptively simple. It’s no surprise that, to date, The Milk Carton Kids have been nominated for four Grammy awards. The surprise is that they’ve yet to win one. Could this, their seventh album and their latest since 2023’s Only See the Moon, be the one that finally sees their talent properly acknowledged? Well, maybe.
There’s no denying the talent that’s on show here. These are uniformly well-written songs, delivered impeccably, and the album is a joy to listen to, but it does lack dynamics, and not for the first time. The only track on the album that even approaches a real change of pace is the closing Young Love, and even that isn’t much more than a restrained lope. Some of the tracks are almost glacial in their delivery; they move so slowly. It has to be said that this in no way detracts from the songs individually; there’s not a bad track on the album, but over the course of the whole disc, it’s a pacing that some might find wearing. Obviously, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan are not exactly known for ‘rockin’ out’, and much of the appeal of their music does lie in its gentle and considered delivery, but a couple of tracks along the lines of previous songs like Girls Gather Round or I Still Want a Little More could’ve contributed to a better flow to the album and given it just a bit more variety.
On the other hand, perhaps the duo felt that a variety in the song pacing wasn’t needed. When you’ve got songs as intelligently reflective as the title track, Lost Cause Lover Fool, or as hauntingly majestic as Ribbon, perhaps the dynamics in the songs exist despite the uniformity of pace. The more you listen to this album, the less the mundane seems to bother you.
Pattengale, who produced the album, has said that this is a collection of songs about transformation: “Each song takes a single moment, sometimes examined with microscopic closeness and sometimes viewed from a great distance, and lets it expand until it becomes an entire world. By enlarging small feelings until they’re inhabitable, the record looks for eternity not in the sweeping or monumental, but in the intimate specifics that usually pass too quickly to notice.” It is the small details that make this record, and few artists pay as much attention to detail as Ryan and Pattengale. Of the nine tracks on the album, only two, Sad Song ( Willie Watson and Morgan Nagler), and Ribbon (Maya Elizabeth de Vitry), weren’t written by the artists themselves, and the only additional musician on the album is Dennis Crouch, who contributed bass on Sad Song. This is an album that is all about this duo and the quality of the music they deliver, with as few diversions from that focus as possible. It is genuinely amazing how effortless they make these songs sound but, when you listen in depth, there is just so much going on. Their two very different styles of guitar playing complement each other so perfectly, and the way they weave their vocal harmonies together is a master class in voices serving the song. These guys know how to deliver a performance.
Tantalisingly close to perfection.
