"First solo effort by Minneapolis guitarist Millard, who is best known for work with psych and metal-flecked bands of the Twin Cities. But this is classic mock bedroom pop experimentalism (it was recorded in a studio). Lots of odd rhythms to the acoustic and electric guitars, vocals that range from nearly gentle to howling, croaky sonics, etc. It has a bit of the late 1980s Jandek vibe at times-a sound I never tire of hearing". - Byron Coley in the Wire April 2015


"So, hypothetically speaking, if you were to tell me that the picture on the front of the above J-Card was, in fact, aside from the transplanted face, lifted from an old baseball card that fetches a pretty penny nowadays, known in many circles as the ‘Bill Ripken- Rick Face’ card, the words ‘RICK’ and ‘FUCK’ looking a helluva lot alike when sharpee’d on the bottom of a baseball bat, I’d probably tell you that I may or may not have it somewhere in my parents’ attic just outside of Dayton, Ohio.

Also, if you were to tell me about how quite a high percentage of blackmetal bands actually take pride in their recordings sounding like shit, and that one renowned drummer went on record as to explicitly request of his sound engineer that their (the blackmetal band’s) album should sound like they were being recorded in a trashcan, well, I’d ask you if that drummer’s Christian name was, in fact, Oscar D. Grouch.

Moreover, if you were to tell me, in earnest, that Jason Millard, notably a pretty all around bad-ass, jack-of-all-trades musician from Minneapolis, Minnesota was somehow inspired to record a concept album, whereby all recorded sounds were painstakingly labored over to simulate a fight-to-the-death sequence (in song form, spanning a half hour plus) between the remaining Sun City Girls gents and all them rascally members ever involved with Harvey Milk (the band, silly)- and that this fight would not be hand-to-hand, but rather sonically, with rhythmic and lead acoustic guitars traded off randomly between these axe-men- and that these fight-sounds would only be recorded (or, really, simulated to be recorded) through chintzy, piezo pick-ups that were, in turn, shoddily soldered onto the four walls and rusted underbelly of an industrial sized dumpster, acting as container/fighting ring for these aforementioned participants, this dumpster, itself, situated in an abandoned, spacious, concrete bunker that has, over the past twelve seasons or so received its own fair share of flooding, rusting, and subsequent mildewing/dead-vermin-soup-gone-dehydrated-relief-sculptures- and that this, get this, that beside this industrial, hypothetical dumpster, situated in this abandoned bunker, there has also perished an ancient reel-to-reel recording mechanism, stitched together by time’s deposition of excrement and detritus, this recording mechanism’s sound output being a hard-won watermark of ingenious novelty, whose ‘property of…’ sticker has scrawled into the blank cream/mold-colored field, in all lower case English print, but with an Aramaic lilt to the descenders, “MOSES”, this built-to-electrocute mechanism was responsible for recording aforementioned sound-event’s faulty EQ fidelity, warble, decibel drop-out, and all around general feeling of “Boy, it’d be impossible for someone in their bedroom to accidentally consistently record so many tracks with such dedication to sounding like baby Jebus hisself were just shitting on the microphone like half the time, well, I’d probably humour you and ask for a hand-written lyric sheet so that I could play this brilliant concept album at peak volume on my shitty stereo speakers and sing along in my most proud falsetto, to display that I, finally, have something more obvious than the Nick Drake discography to play when less heavy handed clues have fallen short in inspiring my dallying guests that, as dawn has far since vanished, it is, indeed, time for them to leave." -- Jacob An Kittenplan in Cassette Gods

cassettegods.blogspot.com/2015/09/jason-millard-second-based-c32-lighten.html