Milemarker - Landlord
Milemarker - Cryogenic Sleep

The best and worst thing about working at a copy shop is that everyone asks you for favors. It worked out well a few times as I hooked up various local bands with demo or seven-inch covers or the locals art co-op with some new signage and flyers. And then sometimes friends of friends would want the hook up and things got more complicated. It's one thing to put my job on the line for something I support; it's something else entirely if someone who I don't even hang out with wants free stuff.

So a friend of a friend had some photos of a band and wanted to make them into posters. There were about 5 different pics and if I made an 18"x24" digital print of each I'd be ripping off Paul Orfella for around $180. I wasn't prepared to do that for someone I had barely even met once. (Though she did convince me to buy Le Tigre's first record the one and only time I met her at Noise Noise Noise.)

So I decided to make the posters on the blueprint copier (called an Óce by those in the biz). I scanned in the photos, half-toned them and everything, just to get the best possible results from the line-art reproducer. And while I'm scanning in the photos I think, wow, these guys look really cool (read: these guys dress like me and have similar haircuts.) When my friend came to pick up the posters (and was disappointed they weren't in color), I made to ask who this band was. Milemarker.

Coincidences generally occur in three and are rarely a happenstance. Soon after I was reading whatever the hip magazine of the day was, either Punk Planet or Skyskraper and came across a review of Milemarker's Anesthetic. The review only fueled my interest in this new band and informed me that Al Burian, who regularly writes columns for Punk Planet, was a founding member of Milemarker. Oh, I had to get this record.

But apparently it wasn't as important as getting the new Zeke record because I took my 'lunch' break at OCC to drive up to Vinyl Solution on Zeke mission. But after a B-line to the Z-section, my mission was a failure. And like all music junkies I decided to just look around and pick up something else to get my fix.

A CD packaged in all pink with a pegasus gracing it's cover caught my eye in the M's. Worth purchasing on the appeal of the cover art alone, it was the new Milemarker album I had read about.

And I didn't really like it.

Maybe six months later I decided to give the Milemarker disc another try. I can distinctly remember pulling into the Home Depot parking lot to buy art project materials and not wanting to stop the CD. This time something was different; I was ready for this. I'm not sure why "Shrink to Fit" (Anesthetic's opening track) didn't catch me right away on first listen, maybe I didn't it up loud enough. But on this occasion all the elements were in place and when "A Quick Trip to the Clinic" blared out of my stereo speakers as I pulled into that Home Depot I knew I was hooked.

I've kept up with Milemarker throughout their releases and collected some of the albums which came out before Anesthetic. (Including Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth, which is one of the greatest album titles of all time, and contains what I'd call my 'favorite' Milemarker song, "Sex Jam Two: Insect Incest," and its close runner-up, "Cryogenic Sleep.")

"Landlord" makes it way to your ear from Milemarker's fifth and latest album, Ominosity. Released back in October of 2005, I was only recently able to pick up a copy of this disk. Normally I can't stand psuedo-journalistic text in band's promotional schpeals, but this time all the hype hits the mark. Ominosity really does sounds like the album Milemarker has been trying to make all along... and I loved the earlier work. This is some twisted news for new listeners because if you don't like this album you most likely won't like the other ones, and if you go out and buy this album first it's may seem all down hill from there. But, I'm going to post "Cryogenic Sleep" just for some sort of context and perhaps even if you fall in love with Ominosity you can still find the gems on the other records.

You can download two other tracks from Ominosity here.

(Buy Ominosity at Insound.)
(Buy Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth at Insound.)