Amy Milan’s honey sweet voice helps keep the Star’s out of indie music’s comfortable ruts. “Honey from the Tomb,” her newly released solo album, however, does not escape country music and girl rock’s comfortable ruts. A good listen but not an album with longevity, “Honey from the Tombs,” is great for anyone looking for a bigger does of Milan, but not for anyone looking for more than that.
Milan called in “Honey from the Tombs” because she wrote all the songs between 1993 and 2000, dragged them out of the tomb to re-record them with some help from Broken Social Scene and her old roommates Crazy Strings. Egyptians, Milan told Chart Attack magazine, used to preserve mummies with honey. Turns out honey isn’t quite the right preservative for songs. Milan probably doesn’t have the time to write new songs with the Stars busy touring schedule, but releasing old songs feels like a step backwards from her career with the Stars.
“Honey from the Tombs,” celebrates heart break and whiskey in 12 lovely odes. “Baby I” is a great optimistic cover of a deathly sad song. Milan manages to bridge the two contrasting elements of the song with just the tremors of her voice. In “Skinny Boy,” Milan is accompanied by her Broken Social Scene friends and the difference between the tracks with and without them is palatable. While the rest of the songs are pleasant, only accompaniment takes the album to the next level.
How do you compare to Broken Social Scene? You don’t, you just have a pretty voice and make an okay album filled with whiskey references and lost love. Like Most Serene Republic, Jason Collette, and the other Arts and Crafts side projects, Milan’s album makes you realize that the individual musicians are all talented but the magic of BSS comes from the ambitious – and successful – scale of its collaboration. |