Review Summary: A practice in geographical-musicology
Last summer three punk acts of varying styles from three different corners of the country, Merchandise (Florida), Destruction Unit (Arizona), and Milk Music (Washington), toured extensively across the United States. This must have left enough of an impression to put out a three-way split in this year’s warmer months. Just as that tour served to reconcile their geographical differences, this split serves to reconcile their sonic differences; each band takes the same ideas of Americana only to modify them and filter them into a product of their geography.
Merchandise’s side starts with omnipresent soft guitar buzzes and a signature sardonic vocal delivery. These facets are countered appropriately with Destruction Unit’s more pummeling guitar swirls and Milk Music’s more earnest and impassioned vocals. Likewise, Merchandise end their side on a crescendo with one of the slickest, well-timed guitar solos in the last minute or so of “Figured Out”, only to be pulled down into the depths of the most punishing, drugged out moments on this split, found in Destruction Unit’s two songs. On the heels of Destruction Unit’s cult-like idolatry of noise, “Church of Jesus Christ”, it’s Milk Music’s turn to provide a soft landing, vamping out a 9 minute jam covering CCR’s “Effigy”. Each band’s contribution complements the others’ which helps this full length split come across as more purposed, and less as three bands dicking around because they can.
It’s difficult to tease apart these bands from their places of origin, but I doubt that that was the bands’ intentions. On USA ‘13, Merchandise reflect a humid, enveloping, Floridian heat, Destruction Unit an unrelenting desert-dry Sonoran Desert heat, and Milk Music a melancholic Pacific Northwest overcast. As a whole, it works to provide different perspectives of the same story.
