After releasing their debut full-length Cruise Your Illusion with help from Fat Possum in 2013, Olympia punks Milk Music dropped their new Mystic 100’s LP with no fanfare, on appropriately mysterious label Dom America. And as with Cruise, it’s full of pure kinetic joy. Take its second track, “Twists & Turns & Headtrips,” a quintessential driving song. It starts on a keyed-up four-to-the-floor drum beat and careens through waves of scuzzy guitar, which all makes a line like “take the crazy paisley lizard/on the freeway for a spin” feel right at home. It’s meant for a West Coast open road: an old car, long hair blowing through the hot wind.
This is the oldest trope in the American road-cowboy book, but one that holds a deep power over everyone that steps into it, and one that frontperson Alex Coxen holds in great esteem. It’s not just the lizard king—Milk Music makes no secret of worshipping the old gods, from hat tips to Neil Young and Meat Puppets to a disaffected golden-age nostalgia that once drove the band to hide out in Joshua Tree, take acid, and “shoot a gun at the moon.” America’s most revered rock’n’roll came from the same “no rules, man” libertarian ethos: the premise that radical counterculture can come from isolation rather than organizing. It’s a legacy of escapism that sent white people to the desert in droves in the ’60s to drop out and make art in canyons while civil rights movements struggled against state violence that turned cities into war zones. The conditions that enable this—along with whatever ethos compels white men to uncritically invoke Eastern spirituality motifs—are due for a long line of critical inquiry that requires more column room than is possible here. In the meanwhile, the aesthetic of freedom rock is still potent.
The high-octane “Dare to Exist” is the other major scorcher. It carries a vibrant, swinging ’70s blues riff, the kind your local rock dad would swear harkens back to Zeppelin or Stevie Ray Vaughan, thrown into an ornery garage track. Like “Out of My World,” from debut EP Beyond Living, or any major track from Illusion, it’s what Milk Music does best, with Coxen’s voice now even more front and center, sneering about the audacity of existence.
Mystic 100’s references Beyond Living more directly by using the same closing song. “The Burning Light” was left as an instrumental track on Living, but on Mystic 100’s, there are newly added lyrics that make it anthemic. Milk Music want to give birth to burning light, Milk Music hate the shadows (“I don’t want to be a punk, it’s so sad, you know?”). Like their soul siblings Merchandise’s iconic “Become What You Are,” “The Burning Light” is simultaneously world-weary and desirous of pure life.
Scuzzy California sun-rock has come back into prominence in the last decade or so (Ty Segall, King Tuff), but the core of this album lies in the kind of deep psychedelia that sets in around the Northwest and Northeast alike (Gun Outfit, MV & EE). “Dramatic Exit” is a gorgeous freaked-out psych odyssey: the pleasurable ooze of Pure X intertwined with the heaviness of Sun City Girls’ “Blue Mamba.” It’s a desert mirage complete with paroxysms of searing, agonized saxophone. Then, clocking in at almost nine minutes, “Crying Wand” fully unwinds into a headscape of searching guitar passages and elegant progressions. It rides waves of exuberance and longing before crashing into abrupt, fuck-it catharsis: a tension between nihilistic fun and heady expansiveness that fuels the heart of Mystic 100’s.
