And Now It Is Time

....to write about one of my favorite albums.

OK so there are these guys, and they start a band, and they call themselves the Descendents. And then in '81 they put out this album, maybe you've heard of it. It's called Milo Goes To College.

See that guy right there on the cover? That's Milo. He went to college. Got himself a doctorate in biochemistry, actually.

Milo was released in '81. It was a pretty big change-up, musically. It combined the sound of hardcore punk with personal lyrics. Sure the lyrics were about punk standbys such as girls, parents, and not fitting in. But whereas other bands seemed to whine about it, these guys fucking yelled. Loudly, as a matter of fact. Not that yelling was new, Black Flag's Damaged came out at about the same time. But it wasn't "Raaagh fuck the man fuck the system punk as hell roooargh" yelling. It was "FUCK YOU MOM AND DAD I HATE YOU YOU SUCK" yelling, and we can all relate to that at some point.

Like I said, individually, the parts are pretty basic. In fact, taken separately, they aren't that great. Anybody could've written "Parents" for example. But only Milo could shout about it with so much rage and honesty that you have to think "man seriously fuck parents parents suck. Man this guy knows what's up. He knows what it's like to be pissed at mom and dad." Yeah no shit, he probably wrote it because he was pissed at, wait for it....mom and dad.

This album sounds a lot rougher than most of their other stuff, both in sound and in feel. It sounds like four guys in a garage just playing loud and singing louder, probably because that's what they were. But that doesn't hurt the album at all. In fact, it makes it even better. Why would you want all that rage and vitriol sounding all polished anyway? Polish this too much and you'd have some damn screamo band and we aren't going there.

For setting a trend, and inspiring 25 years of punks, I'm giving Milo Goes To College four and a half out of five stars.

Stay tuned for Teenage Bottlerocket (maybe?), the Queers (probably), and Screeching Weasel, just as soon as I find some of the stuff I've already written.