milo - A Toothpaste Suburb

Scrolling through Tumblr for the first time after a week in the Minnesota Boundary Waters, it was obvious that I had missed a lot. Robin Williams hung himself with a belt, Ferguson was becoming some kind of surreal war zone in "post-racial America," violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict was making national news. In between vaporwave-aesthetic gifs and One Piece manga caps, I watched it all unfold bit-by-bit (the only way to learn anything on a social network) with a vague disinterest mostly related to having just taken my first shower in a week and the time being 4am. I'll care about this in the morning, I remember thinking. The artwork for an album cover caught my eye, and I followed a Soundcloud link to this milo guy's track and listened to a sleepy, leaky faucet sounding beat unfurl into some verses with way too many cultural references to catch in one take. It was a welcoming sound. The production was smart, like something taken from a Baths track, and I remember feeling pretty tingly over the lines "I've been out of place like transitional lenses, comma splices in a suspended sentence, kiss the nose of the vulture, destroy the bro culture," etc. The song finished and my hard drive died promptly thereafter. At that point, feeling sufficiently attuned to the media overload once again, I fell asleep on Thomas's couch. I didn't listen to milo for a few days while my laptop was being repaired, but at that point I was already pretty hyped to get to hear the entire thing.

Thankfully, A Toothpaste Suburb arrived today, and I don't want to waste any time spreading the word. At the risk of sounding like myself, I'll say this is easily my favorite album from 2014 thus far. Open Mike Eagle's Dark Comedy was my previous contender, which is no surprise - milo makes it clear from the first track that he and his fellow label artist are good friends, and Mike makes an appearance on "Objectifying Rabbits" for a short verse. But milo takes things a little further, and it gets a little weirder on A Toothpaste Suburb.

Gary Paulsen, Instagram, Yoni Wolf (YES!), Guy Fieri, the Nightosphere -- Nothing is too obscure for milo's lexicon. I debated making a graph to map out these references, but that would ruin the fun of listening to every song again and again, trying to decipher every sentence. It's like a game of Pop Culture Trivial Pursuit. Kool AD even references himself and talks about it on "In Gaol," in a pretty hilarious verse about not really anything. It may seem like milo is making fun of anything and everything, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that he's really just making fun of himself for being so involved in the whole mess.

Knowing a lot about the internet isn't where milo's most important skills lie, though. He's talented. milo plays with metaphors like they're Lego blocks and some lyrics hit way harder than you could imagine a line about a dead bird ever could. He mumbles a bit less than he used to on his previous releases, but he still doesn't sound like a guy that realizes how witty he is.

When milo drops his barriers on "Just Us (A Reprise for Robert Who Will Never be Forgotten)," a revisited track about losing his brother, the effect is brutal and stomach turning. "Now kids write me about being their favorite rapper, and I'm the asshole who gets to live forever after," he spits with a level of clarity hardly visited on the album before, and a simple flat-line "I miss you" punctuates the song with so much earnest that I feel undeserved to type those same words in this review. It's a complicated song, and possibly the most real song about death that I've heard in a long time.

Beneath the plethora of name checks and chuckles on A Toothpaste Suburb, milo shows his reverence for life and some pretty complex feelings about death. The perspective is bizarre, but showing it any other way would be selling all of 2014 short. What a bizarre year it has been.

Happy fall

- Kane

Listen to A Toothpaste Suburb on Soundcloud or Bandcamp