LA singer-songwriter duo The Milk Carton Kids supply a soundtrack for the (hopefully) pastoral summer days to come. With their 7th album, Lost Cause Lover Fool, they ‘…turn down the volume on a chaotic world and make room for what matters most.’
TURN DOWN THE VOLUME ON A CHAOTIC WORLD
The Milk Carton Kids are LA-based singer-songwriter duo Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan. They first got together in 2011 and Lost Cause Lover Fool is their seventh album together. By their own admission, the pair are: “…more interested in precision than volume,” and that’s a mission that bears fruit in every note of every track on Lost Cause Lover Fool.
“We’ve always been conscious of trying to make our two voices sound like one,” says Ryan “And to make our guitars sound like one instrument, too.” That’s a statement that offers a pretty good idea of what listeners can expect from Lost Cause Lover Fool. And, if anyone thinks that their songwriting workshop, Sad Songs Summer Camp, offers another clue towards the duo’s stock in trade, they’d be right.
The Milk Carton Kids have accumulated quite some track record during the 15 years of their existence. They’ve received four Grammy nominations and their songs have cropped up in numerous film and TV projects. They’ve also collaborated with the likes of Joe Henry, Rosanne Cash, Sara Bareilles and Josh Ritter. And, throughout all their adventures, The Milk Carton Kids have remained committed to a deceptively simple idea: music can help turn down the volume on a chaotic world and make room for what matters most.
UTTERLY PRECISE
The scene for the album is set right from the opening bars of Blue Water, the song that gets Lost Cause Lover Fool up and running. Gently-picked banjo provides a contemplative accompaniment to the song’s uncomplicated lyrics and simple, thoroughly effective, vocal harmonies. There’s a more vivid aspect to the vocals on the thought-provoking My Place Among the Stones. The thoughts and plight of a soon-to-be-repatriated migrant are considered in lines like: “…Then they told me that I’d be going home, off to a land I have never called my own,” and they’re sung with a palpable empathy.
The pace quickens – very slightly – as the duo’s array of acoustic instruments is joined by a rhythm section for the excellent A Friend Like You. The song’s lyrics recall a road trip through Texas and New Mexico and the anguish caused by sharing space with someone when the most important things remain unspoken. The tune is reminiscent of Knocking on Heaven’s Door and lines like: “You’ve been dreaming since Abilene – Why the hell do you have to be so sweet” and “Rocky Mountain skies – I’m going to miss you the rest of my life” exert a strong pull on the heart strings.
Banjo and slide guitar take the lead for I’ll Go Home From Here, an easy-going country-flavoured song. And, not for the last time, Kenneth’s and Ryan’s voices mesh just like Simon’s and Garfunkel’s – with the same tender passion. And the album’s title track is another song that picks up where Simon and Garfunkel left off. The vocal harmonies are, quite simply, stunning and – in accordance with the duo’s stated mission – utterly precise. Lyrics like: “My mind ain’t tough, it’s a saboteur – I’m your lost cause lover fool” ooze self-doubt, but the song’s impact is positively fulfilling.
UPBEAT
The countryfied intro to Blinded and Smiling – a song that: “…compresses joy, love and mortality into the instant it takes to snap a photograph, reckoning with how quickly even the happiest moments slip into the past” – is, maybe, a tad deceptive. The song is, quite possibly, the album’s saddest, and there’s a stark vulnerability to the vocal tones during lines like: “You say I always make such a big deal out of nothing.”
Despite its title and its lyrical subject matter, Sad Song is, perhaps, the album’s most upbeat track. It’s one of just two songs not composed by Kenneth and Ryan (it’s written by Willie Watson and Morgan Nagler). Medium-paced fingerpicked acoustic guitar, highlighted by flashes of slide, provide a warm accompaniment to more of Kenneth’s and Ryan’s sublime harmonies. Ribbon, the album’s other non-original song, comes from the pen of Nashville songwriter Maya Elizabeth de Vitry. It’s a truly delightful song and everything about The Milk Carton Kids’ interpretation – the pared back accompaniment, the precisely-delivered harmonies and the guitar fills – is just so.
AN ALBUM FOR ALL MOODS AND OCCASIONS
Lost Cause Lover Fool is brought to its close with Young Love, a song in which the duo wonder what happened to a long-lost companion. It’s a last chance to savour those spot-on vocal harmonies, with colour added by the picked banjo and sparkles of slide guitar. Lost Cause Love Fool is an excellent album; it’s an album for all moods and occasions and it’s just the thing to soundtrack the pastoral summer days that are – hopefully – headed our way. I’ll be playing this one for a long time to come.
“This album is, at its core, a collection of songs about transformation,” explains Kenneth. “About the shifting terrain of consciousness and the stories we build to understand who we’ve been, who we are and who we’re becoming. Each song takes a single moment, sometimes examined with microscopic closeness and sometimes viewed from a great distance, and lets it expand until it becomes the entire world, By enlarging small feelings until they’re inhabitable, the record looks for eternity not in the sweeping or monumental, but in the intimate specifics that usually pass to quickly to notice.”
Listen to a Friend Like You – a track from the album – below:
The Milk Carton Kids: Website