If you grew up identifying as a rock'n'roll kid, you’ll probably find something comfortingly familiar about West Coast artist Colleen Green. For one, there's the fact that she named her first LP Milo Goes to Compton-- a play on the title of the Descendents' first album, Milo Goes to College-- and has loaded it up with enough historical references to make it clear that there was some overlap between your high school record collection and hers. If you don't notice that album opener "Good Good Things" is also a cover of a song by the same flagship California punk band, for instance, you'll probably recognize track two as a scuzz-laden half-cover of "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones. Perhaps you'll see something of your own ideal likeness in the cartoon rendering of the 27-year-old Boston transplant that appears on the album art-- Wayfarer-style sunglasses, palm trees, sun-- and if not, then you’re probably familiar with other millennial garage rockers who’ve tapped a similar iconography.
Milo Goes to Compton, which she originally self-released on cassette tape last year, builds on the simple-as-hell, one-woman-band arrangements that marked 2011's Cujo EP. While perhaps a bit quirkier and diminutive in stature, her amalgam of punk, garage, and 1960s girl group memories feels like something you might expect from a member of the Art Fag Recordings stable, which has included Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast, Bleached, and other contemporary proponents of time-tested guitar-pop thrills. Hustling together the album's eight tracks from nothing but a drum machine, multi-tracked vox, and some fuzzed-out power chords, Green enacts the less-is-more principle on a molecular level, as though she were trying to see how many elements she could subtract from the rock band equation while still creating an overall impression of rock'n'roll.
Depending on your relationship to the rock tropes that abound here, this could feel either endearing or lazy. Lyrically, Green's shortened attention span for pretty much anything beyond crushes, marijuana, and complicated love is likely to recall Best Coast, although her delivery is deadpan enough to discount any aspirations toward belting pop diva-dom. More than sublimate heartbreak into collective exaltation, she shades these lyrical themes a bit darker than the punchy power riffs might suggest. The aforementioned Ramones classic, for example, is renamed "I Wanna Be Degraded", with Green introducing a few NSFW scenarios for the sake of illustration. Album single "Worship You", similarly, sees Green warning a romantic prospect that he had better "worship her" if he wants "to be the one I sleep with every night/ to be the one I let tie me up tight." That the song ends with her desiring to "worship" the same person isn't the only thing that makes its sentiment feel less than cut-and-dry. More striking is the fact that she sounds cool as a cucumber, as though the lyrical content of the song were only secondary, a conduit for a catchy, sock-hopping melody.
More often than not, it feels like Green is trying to hide from us, layering on the auto-harmonies so thick that you cannot even tell which vocal track is meant to be the lead. But what carries Milo Goes to Compton is less its dark-sunglasses-inscrutability than Green's economical melodic sense, which leverages minimal gestures for maximal impact-- loaded pauses included. Her cover of "I Will Follow Him", for example, would be a whole lot less fresh-sounding if it didn't contract the 1963, Little Peggy March original into a skeletal, two-note affair, jauntily layered over a mechanical groove. Likewise, part of the pleasure of listening to "Always on My Mind", is simply hearing the sound of her left hand sliding repetitively up and down the guitar neck, sounding ever-so-slightly different-- or imperfect-- with each go-around.
If we're comparing Green to other, better-known female garage rock heroes of the past few years, I’d say that the Vivian Girls sound like the most kindred of spirits. A band whose members are so unattached to their own instruments that they are willing to swap them mid-performance doesn't just reaffirm the DIY notion that anyone can make catchy, thoroughly engaging rock'n'roll regardless of technical skill, it elevates that understanding to a central facet of their art. Green does that on the level of each individal song, and our enjoyment stems partly from sensing just how much fun she seems to be having while building them, note by note.
