My Milky Way Arms, My Milky Way Arms

Dear My Milky Way Arms: thanks for totally ruining my long-time love for (post-Gary Numan, pre-Talking Heads-ish) proto-electronic music. It’s over. Forever. And it’s your fault. Your self-titled debut EP sounds like a junior varsity marriage between Holy Fuck and Hot Chip, and in five songs you’ve given me the clearest definition of “mediocre” I’ve ever heard. There are songs on here that remind me of the color grey, and I hate the color grey. It bores me like mini-blinds bore me, and mini-blinds are really boring.

Synthesizers, drums, guitars, vocals, repeat. Pseudo-philosophy disguised as profundity. Remember when you thought of this lyric: “What one may see as weakness, I see a perfect flaw / The tiniest bit of detail is the greatest small / So when your brain is freakin’ over an atom’s bond, what will this worry do but drive you to change what’s not really wrong”? Oh, man — I bet you want a take-back.

Or maybe I just don’t get it. Maybe I don’t get a one-word song (the word, by the way, is “Ooohhh,” and the song is called “Sunshine”), or maybe I don’t get why you would take the title of a breathtaking and hugely important book (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and name a song after it with the words, “Feeling fifteen, but I’m [enter appropriate age] killing my stability / ‘Cause I feel myself ending an ultra-everlasting brain freeze,” giving it its meaning. Is that irony or something else, something like blah?

I know you guys are from Houston, and I love supporting local acts, but come on…gimme something I can use. There’s nothing here that makes me want to not turn this record off. It’s the same thing again and again, and that’s a hard thing to do when creating music that is supposed to be danceable or eclectic or playful. This record just falls flat from the first listen.