The thing with Milk Music is they're not horribly original or innovative. What they
are is easily digestible and genuine rock and roll done right. Making no effort to hide their influences,
Cruise Your Illusion is drenched with some fuzzed out and, at times, downright ferocious (see “New Lease on Love”) guitar riffs, soaring and melodic leads and faulty yet sincere vocals, a la Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth.
However pervasive their influences might be, Milk Music do a fine job of finding their own identity and avoiding predictability. On more than one occasion, these songs undergo the slightest tempo change or perhaps a not so obvious placement of a guitar lead (see the call and answer transitioning of vocals and guitar in “Cruising With God”). The album is filled with these small yet noticeable nuances that push each of these songs above the threshold of run-of-the-mill rock and roll.
It's not hard to see what makes
Cruise Your Illusion so great. There are no big overhauls that will make you
change the way you think about music, dude. As the album title suggests, Milk Music put their efforts here into tweaking and ever-so-slightly reworking things of American legend. At the album's last song, “The Final Scene”, any residual traces of romantic, youthful Americana ambition washes over, and the dreary 8-minute slow jam plays out, never overstaying its welcome and never leaving any stones unturned.
Cruise Your Illusion toes the line of the awkward and unfamiliar, and the bland and over-done.
