Green Milk fromthe Planet Orange
w/Master Musicians of Bukkake, Bill Horist
Fri July 8, Funhouse, 9:30 pm, $7, 21+.
You think Japan's Green Milk from the Planet Orange have a long name? You should listen to their songs—provided you have the patience, you with your random-shuffling, iPod-listening ways. If the album format is dead, as some pundits posit, then Green Milk... (oh, forget it) are doomed to languish in obscurity. Only those pitiful Luddites who actually buy CDs or vinyl and listen attentively to them from start to finish—and who don't get fidgety when songs pass the six-minute mark—will pay heed to this androgynous trio.
Which is a shame, really, because Green Milk have a knack for creating eerie suspense and pants-filling dread using spartan means (think Pink Floyd's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" and the Doors' "The End"). The five tracks (spanning 71 minutes) on He's Crying "Look" (Beta-lactam Ring, 2004) unclichédly employ quiet/loud dynamics. The 16-minute "When Every Colour Turns Black," for example, ebbs and flows like a marathon sexual encounter between paranoid schizophrenics. When Green Milk do bust out of sparse, meditative passages, they build to a magmatic momentum à la '70s Kraut rockers Guru Guru and Amon Düül II. "Sweet 5 A.M.," by contrast, is an introverted ballad with restrained, repetitive Sonic Youthian guitar clang and analog-synth whistling. This is Green Milk's radio-friendly song.
The band's new album, City Calls Revolution, detours into straightforward, '70s hard-rock combustion with slight acidic touches. This new direction's more earthbound and linear, and is probably a better deal for today's ADD-addled populace. Drink deeply. ■
