Smell the Parade

This lo-fi effort is the brainchild of the quirky Milo of Atlanta, GA, who recorded the album in his living room. Milo's lead vocals are accompanied primarily by solo guitar, clarinet, and sparse MIDI keyboard. The jokey lo-fi ditties on this, his first CD release, dabble in a diverse set of styles: sodden sleaze blues, country western pastiche, solo punk, staccato cabaret piano, faintly Mexican cheeseball keyboard pop, and spaghetti Western-style balladeering. Smell the Parade is a pockmarked field of hits and misses. The best of the lot are "The Minimalist" — a sly satire about a "black and white" slave to Puritan fashion, who "still listens to the Ramones," gets rid of all his junk, and has a Buddha in his yard — and "Mirko's Car," which could best be described as lo-fi Bosnian punk, funnily evoking a Jim Jarmuschian world of down-on-their-luck losers. "Open Minds Open Sores" is a tasteless play upon country western balladeering. The album is a homegrown variant of postmodern novelty humor with mixed results. Needless to say, Smell the Parade is an acquired taste for dabblers in the lo-fi underground scene and should be filed under offbeat Americana.