Hailing from Los Angeles, and now based in Paris, the five-piece psych indie rock band We Are MILK‘s latest E.P., Monochrome, features the riveting single, “Parallels.”
“It pushes audiences to the stage and creates a vibe that pulsates through a crowd,” says keyboardist Maeva . “It starts with a little eery/spooky sound wave which came from my keyboard.”
The song is off of the band’s second E.P. and the follow-up to an impressive debut that created a buzz around Paris and landed the band a nod in the coveted Rolling Stone magazine (France) and a run of shows.
WAM also brought back recording engineer and producer Fran Ashcroft (Blur, Dandy Warhols, Gorillaz) to work on the new E.P. Impressive resume there and it shows in his work with WAM.
https://milklosangeles.bandcamp.com/track/parallels
But that doesn’t mean that the band members have had an easy go at it. “Nowadays, bands like ours are doing everything: writing; recording; promotion; booking; gigging,” Robinson exclaims. “That’s on top of day jobs to finance all it.”
The band’s sound is a swirling mix of Brian Jonestown Massacre’s delicateness with a mellowed-out Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and Sky Cries Mary-like grooves accented by ‘trip-pop’ and ‘alternative psychedelia’ elements.
“Our goal is to mix neo-alternative rock and psychedelic music with a grunge attitude,” says vocalist and guitarist Eric Marx.
“In Paris, our drummer Dylan Strazar broke his ankle and turned into percussionist for a couple of months,” adding that the band had to adapt the song for acoustic gigs. The lead outro vocals were recorded “during a live acoustic rendition” recorded at a summer festival in Paris.
Another song, “So Far,” came about after a long jam session during rehearsals. “It came as a healing song while I was going through very intense and difficult times, both artistic and personal,” he says reflectively.
“I wrote the instrumental bridge later on in Paris – from a Pink Floyd perspective. It proved to be challenging to record because we had so many moods to choose from.”
And then there is “Down The Machine”:
We can certainly vouch for some of those proclamations as well as the band’s almost innate ability to drift in and out of each style and signature effortlessly with guidance from Ashcroft.
In addition to Robinson and Strazar, the other band members are guitarist Steve Elmy and bassist Allanis.
The band moved to Paris from Los Angeles in 2018 to experience the ‘European music scene,’ Robinson says adding, “Even though, I would hardly call Paris an actual rock town like Los Angeles.”
The band is playing gigs and working on new material.
(Unfortunately, it is hard to find more songs to stream online for the band. Having a band name with ‘milk’ in it doesn’t help, considering as well that there are some popular artists with ‘milk’ names.)
