Been a few years since Milk Teddy laid their blissful gem, Zingers, on us, but the wait seems to have been well worth it. The band breezes in with their sophomore LP, Time Catches Up With Milk Teddy, which is equally shambolic in its scope. The band has an innate knack for bridging contemporary Aussie jangles with a windswept approach that scatters any of the natty, prim plucks into the surrounding sunshine. A lot of the credit for this can be hung squarely on the neck of vocalist Thomas Mendelovits, whose blissfully faded delivery folds in an out of the band’s swells with a natural ease.
Mendelovits’ anchoring croon remains a constant, but those underlying swells have taken on considerably more texture from their first outing. Zingers was awash in an echoplex haze, rendering the album gorgeous but gauzy and at times harder to sink your teeth into. Milk Teddy come down to the Earth’s crust to bump elbows with the rest of us on Time Catches Up. They’ve injected the occasional brush with post-punk in a few of their basslines and a couple of space-cake instrumentals but they’re essentially still working through their own brand of gossamer jangle, just on a more tactile level this pass.
The band’s relative obscurity in the US has always struck me as a tragedy, but perhaps it’s time to right a years-long wrong. Time Catches Up is a bold move by the band, stuck together with off-kilter interview snippets and woven like a patchwork quilt made of denim in varying quality and hues. It’s pock-marked and imperfect and that’s exactly what makes it so desirable. Get your perfect glossy pop elsewhere. The LP is worn in all the right places and comfortable as an old t-shirt. Each listen just makes this one more and more endearing as an album that’s gonna test time and come out winning.
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