On those long nights when you find yourself tossing and turning with less than three hours until the alarm clock goes off, your mind tends to do some incredible things. In those moments you become a passenger on a ride through the liminal space between sleep and wakefulness: a land filled with disorienting dreams that are permeated with grains of lucidity. Milquetoast & Co have been on this trip and came back to write about their experience in The Land of Milquebelieve.

For their second release; their first chance to write and record as a five-piece band, Milquetoast & Co (pronounced “milk toast and company”) returned to work with Rotary Records’ engineer/producer Warren Amerman. Together they created what is, in contrast to their first collaboration, Drinking and Smoking Too Much with Women I Hate, a much more stripped-down yet notably more complex record. This time around, Jim McAndrew (vocals/guitar), Joe Mageary (bass), Panama Quinn (percussion), Robin Ryczek (cello), and Bill Whitney (horns/guitar) let the music speak for itself. The band is proud to say that what you hear on Milquebelieve is precisely what you will get at a live performance.

Milquetoast & Co use the tales from The Land of Milquebelieve to broaden their musical scope and further define their style. Where the band’s first record took heavily from time-tested rock and blues formulas and sprinkled in a touch of “other stuff” to make things interesting, The Land of Milquebelieve provides a soundscape that is at once both tightly structured and all over the map, literally. While sailing the seven songs of Milquebelieve the listener will momentarily be with the whirling dervishes in Turkey before finding themselves in a smoky Chicago after-hours club and riding a runaway train down a mountainside all the while getting the sense that they were somehow in all three places at once. The Land of Milquebelieve provides a musical context for yelling to a loved one to “Save Yourself” over a driving rain on The Last Night on Earth or dealing with the hallucinatory “little silhouettes dancing on the wall” caused by a ménage-a-trois with the twin vices of Love and Tonic or catching your breath when you “wake up screaming, head just reeling” from a nightmare that started out as a Rapunzel-esque fairy tale. So tonight, as you close your eyes to begin your own voyage through The Land of Milquebelieve, be sure to look to your left when your train passes Ledgewood Avenue. There, half-buried underneath the snow you will see Milquetoast & Co holding signs reading “Where will YOU be when the bomb hits?” Perhaps, when the time comes, you will be with us: in The Land of Milquebelieve.

"Angular, high-intensity Americana" - The Boston Phoenix

"This very large band from Boston is really so great. Their song Last Drag is so powerful and it just sticks in your head! Milquetoast & Co's lead singer, James McAndrew, just has one of those incredible voices that makes this band unforgettable. Can't wait to see them live!" - The Highway Girl, TheHighwayGirl.com Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.