I find it difficult to believe that anyone reading this site or anyone with even a casual familiarity with the UK scene has failed to hear of Milloy, but here’s a quick recap. The proud Yorkshiremen are the oft-hailed successors to Leatherface‘s position as the seminal UK punk band of the decade; their debut More Than A Machine is the only record thus far to which I’ve given 5 stars.
And onto business. First off, CPWPS is not a departure from the sound many of us have come to know and love. A few of the songs are less instant than those on MTAM – ‘Goodfellas’ stands out in this category, having a little bit of a southern rock influence. Others, such as ‘The Math’ are built around a couple of stock shouts kinda reminiscent of ‘Dibs’.
In fact, you can sort of play a game of matching pairs between the two albums; ‘Mary Rose’ being very similar to ‘Deuce’. Now whilst this type of parallel pleasure is brilliant because the sound was nailed to the wall in the first instance, it does have a slight drawback. And that means the album struggles ever so slightly in forging its own identity. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely has one – but it’s a semi-laboured effort to get there. In fact, as you progress through the album, you find that it does tend to fall a little further from the tree and come into its own. Tracks like ‘Gogglebox’ strike a nice equilibrium between the crunching sounds on the previous album, the emphasis on intricate guitar work from the EPs and split, and in exploring new, more progressive territory – something particularly evident in ‘Stone Court’, the final track.
At 10 tracks, this is perfectly poised – neither too brief, nor laboured, and there’s certainly no room for filler. This is a record chock-full of songs to scream at the stage. But that’s par for the course. The real success here is the creation of something which stands up to a near-perfect debut album – and that’s some achievement.