Sheffield’s Milburn return with an incredibly ambitious third album entitled Time, and time’s one thing they’re not wasting.
With an extremely varied record that tries to have it all, Milburn show they are not afraid of pushing themselves, to try harder just for the sake of it.
It’s for this reason that Time is a success. There are no lazy moments on the record, each track seems to serve a distinct purpose. They’re like mini-episodes, each styled differently, rather than just rinsing and repeating the same ideas. Instead, you get a record that changes pace, tone and style regularly without losing the band’s unique, natural character.
The opener and title-track is a gentle, almost soothing way to start affairs. Without the need for a standard, bombastic beginning, Time gets something different, something more fitting – and that’s true of what happens throughout.
Midnight Control alternatively has a poppier feel, in the wonderfully simple and catchy sense. The tone turns even more dramatically on Nothing For You, a track not a million miles off Muse at their glam-rock best. Only here it’s more relatable as Milburn sensibly opt to not go with the complete space opera insanity.
In the City, on the other hand, has an earthiness that underlies its tenderness, akin to songs like Little Man Tate’s This Must Be Love which gives it a lot more heart, while Medicine has an unusual bounciness to it like many of the tracks on the Infadels’ Universe In Reverse.
Keep Me In Mind, however, is an entirely different story. Heavier, rockier and more powerful than pretty much the rest of the record, it packs a real punch, sitting somewhere between We Are Scientists and the Alan Parsons Project. If that doesn’t sound pretty, worry not. Instead, it’s a concise hit to head.
And it’s this incongruity which works so well throughout; tracks are highly stylised without ever moving away from what or who Milburn are. It’s a difficult feat to pull off, yet they manage it time and time again throughout the album, making for one of the record’s most compelling aspects.
The other is its simplicity. Not in the ambition or songwriting, as Milburn try so many different things with much success, but the simplicity that’s there, there in the unfussiness of the music.
No matter the track, they keep the writing simple and to the point. It makes the songs more effective by giving them a cleaner edge, and also helps them stand apart from each other. In making each track its own separate entity, never simple homages or pastiches, by making them so distinct, Milburn have in turn made them more clearly their own.
All together this makes for a fascinating experience. While it’s never clear what’s going to happen next, it’s also always clearly going to be thoroughly Milburn to its core.
They never lose sight of what they are trying to achieve, and neither will the listener.
