Review of Milburn's CD "Showroom"

Milburn: Showroom

"Whoo!" I say. I say again; "Whoo!"

Here comes a carriage of sparkling, squinty-eyed, broad-rocking, pippety-pop-drop-your-job-n'-roll from boys with brilliant accents and home-grown Sheffield oil splattered up their kecks. A hiccupping squeak of a guitar jauntily hobbles in like a giggling inebriate, appropriately anticipating the sneaky lyrics "Watch out, you know he's up to something..." before the clattering arcadia of drums drunkenly falls down the staircarpet to land on a mountain of bass and contagious cyclical chord changes that'll twirl you around without mercy until you're sick on the bottom step. Really.

Belting out a seemingly irrelevant tagline for a chorus - "The book that you're reading is upside down" (fair enough, mate, but I digest storylines better this way, and the pictures look almost abstract...) - Milburn have a slanty-glanced playfulness about them tied up with genuine swagger and street-cred threat. Caught somewhere in the process of a fantastic identity crisis between the shaven-headed lad smacking globules of gum around his rancid mouth who beat you up as a child for owning a pair of Dunlop Greenflash and the consciously-literate, devastatingly-handsome intellectual who's sitting peacefully on a park bench reading the Guardian, wearing a pinstripe suit, thick-rimmed glasses with aforementioned Greenflash peeking out underneath his pressed pantaloons, Milburn sound like a genetic experiment combining these two specimens in one highly-strung, short-circuited, sharp-witted offspring.

B-side 'Storm In A Teacup' skips about in a manly way, talks of girls saluting magpies (I do that! Weird, aren't I...) and allows the vocalist to have a bit of a paddy over some fuel-devouring, panicked electrics and panting drums. Oh, and as if being assaulted in the sides, belly and back by colossal, thorn-shaped CHOWNS wasn't enough, deep in the rumble-tumble-bumble mix you can hear bits of guitars whining and singing with the sole purpose, surely, of causing your ears to ring and zing forevermore. Bloody scallywags.

So, yes. Joy on a stick, this is. Reet good 'un. And so forth.

• www.milburnmusic.com

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