Milton Star’s wonderfully atmospheric guitarscapes paint vivid images of love, loss and regret lived out in one no-hope town to the next, in the bars, in shady motels and the highways and byways inbetween. Like other plumbers of emotional depths, The Bad Seeds, Mark Lanegan, Elliot Smith, Alex Chilton, even the darker side of Edwyn Collins, whose combination of lyricism and sound in their occasional promotional videos take you to ‘that’ place – Milton Star go that bit further. Every single composition is accompanied too by a visual interpretation – every release becomes a mini-vignette of sound and vision.
Milton Star are a record company’s dream – totally self-sufficient, writing, recording and producing the music, and slick videos in a converted church in darkest Fife, which one half of the band, Alan Wyllie is lucky enough to call home. Alan and co-conspirator Graeme Currie have collaborated on countless musical projects over the years, stretching back to Post Punk band Thursdays who recorded for the highly influential Fast Product label in 1979. Since then their sporadic bouts of productivity has been overshadowed by years of musical inactivity, but 2010 saw them once again picking up the mantle, dissatisfied by the plethora of insipid modern music being made, to produce a hybrid of intelligent Independent and Dark Country compositions. The resultant sound being a stunning collection of songs characterized by sweet structured melodies propelled by an expansive tremolo wall of sound, a dark soul and rich orchestration.
In their own words;
“The thing that feeds the ideas and make the sound are the environment and acoustics here in the church and setting of the surrounding countryside. To have that on tap every day is just wonderful, we’ve been writing together for maybe 30 years and nothing before has come close. We tend to work independently on songs initially, bouncing ideas back and forth and then come together to flesh things out, but there’s no set pattern, sometimes it’s the words, sometimes the music, sometimes a story or a visual, it’s a pretty fluid process once we get going though.”
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