The Oakland-based band Mildred will fool you into thinking you’ve heard them before with their shaggy dog tales mumbled over slacker rock. A part of you will die inside, as you heard this 35 years ago—even though you weren’t alive. Today, you’re seemingly listening to another indie wannabe Pavement with a megalomaniac as President, and anyway, isn’t it time to read Tocqueville? Yet Mildred are no Pavement nor do they try to be; they’re different and smart. “Aquinas”? A song named after the Italian friar and theologian Thomas Aquinas? Exactly.
On their debut album, Fenceline, Mildred ramble like your senile grandmother. However, they are not incomprehensible or do not talk in tongues—in other words, rock ‘n’ roll glossolalia; no, don’t worry, Little Richard. Rather, they echo David Berman’s off-kilter existentialism and absurdist koans, a poetic commentary on the isolation and malaise of modernity. Furthermore, there are an abundance of non-sequiturs and a focus on inconsequential details, such as taking a VHS to a Goodwill store, when, in fact, it is these occurrences that make a day fill a month of a year; someone has to tell the tale.
Mildred‘s aesthetic is built upon inertia and boredom, like the Basement Tapes—especially “Clothes Line Saga”. Their music crawls backwards to something familiar but strange, strange because it is familiar, like the work of David Lynch—and what is more universally symbolic of quotidian United States than a fenceline? A white picket fence. OK. Yet you get the point. That is to say, the iconography of the United States is so deep that it superimposes itself upon the collective conscience and, thus, the record’s imagery. Then it runs you over like a truck with Mildred steering the wheel.
The opener, “UPS Brown”, feels as if you have just woken up—in fact, the first scene is of the narrator on a plane about to land, a metaphor, it seems, for how the album straddles reality and reverie. Indeed, Mildred are the fenceline, a demarcation line between reality and daydreams. It is a strong opening track if only for the point that it foregrounds the LP’s motif of acquiescence. While the melodic “Fish Sticks” is blithe and innocuous, there is a brief, blistering electric guitar solo—mirroring the War on Drugs—in the coda, which conspicuously cuts off.
With an undulating Crazy Horse-esque rhythm, “Charlie” is another plangent number, with an accordion and horn interweaving, not to mention rough-hewn backing harmonies, as if this were CSNY, albeit if they sang aphorisms. Importantly, the high-octane, motorik drumming of “Cobwebs” injects the album with brio before you realize it is bleak, if not the bleakest, number on the record. The singer sounds as if he is swallowing his tears while he sings, as if, despite the energy, he cannot help but succumb to his sadness. “It never ends,” he intones less as a supplication than matter-of-factly.
Mildred are comprised of Henry (vocals, guitar), Jack (vocals, guitar), Matt (vocals, bass, woodwinds), and Will (drums, production). The impression you get from Fenceline is a group of friends playing together; again, like Bob Dylan and the Hawks at the Big Pink in Woodstock. In the earliest stages of the record, three of the four musicians—Will, sporadically—were living together in a house on Ward St, Berkeley, whose roof is depicted on the cover, painted by Jack. The album was recorded in one week at singer-songwriter Luke Temple’s studio in Pasadena, where they played live in one room.
The titular track, “Fenceline”, could be Cameron Winter on vocals—especially when he starts his wordless and whirling moans—in the way the singer elongates his words. It is as if, if he delivered them straight, the words would strike him with all the loneliness and pain they contain. The surreal and nautical “Fleet Week” could be the Grateful Dead, though, instead of conjuring up the spirit of the American railroad engineer Casey Jones, there are “12 young sailors strutting”, and the narrator, along with someone else, muses about the French Impressionist painter Renoir. Good, we’ve now cleared that up.
Mildred have a touch of the “Proustian existentialism” of John Prine (thanks to music critic Bob Dylan for pointing that out about the singer-songwriter). Anyway, all these guys seem to want to do is play slacker rock rendered through Americana, and for you not to question their sound, least of all the dream-like and disparate imagery. Their sound, though, is perhaps best described as fragmented, diaristic lyrics delivered as if they are talking to someone at the corner of a bar, over slow, mellifluous, twangy guitars, with occasional electronic instruments, leaving you feeling as if wisdom can only be disseminated through obliqueness.
Despite the free association of many of the album’s lyrics, “Aquinas” is candid and direct; the narrator reminisces that, while he had thoughts of dying, Thomas Aquinas’ gnomic utterances gave him solace. In other words, Fenceline has enough lyrical and musical variation and stylistic differences to warrant repeated listening. For example, “Mumblecore Melody”, which features a quasi-spoken word bridge, and the last track, the drum-machine-laden “Hardcore of Beauty”.
Listening to Mildred’s music is the equivalent of a bloodshot sunset: beneath the insouciant beauty is a dislocation, an ending, not a beginning, the loneliness at the heart of the American character, where to be a so-called failure is not to exist and success is a vacuous scheme; this is perhaps what is behind the fence. For now, Mildred are content to keep you guessing on the other side, as perhaps they, too, are unsure of what lies behind, or wish they were unsure.
That said, not everything is so goddamn despairing. Mildred demonstrate that the ennui of present-day society can be transcended by a group of friends coming together to perform music, that boredom can be an impetus, not an obstruction, for creativity, and, finally, that the iconography of the United States—fictional or real—is alive. Who needs Norman Rockwell?