Frontier Ruckus

Frontier Ruckus are as awesome as their name. Matthew Milia's voice is a wilderness moan, but much more musical than most prophets. He sounds like Raymond Raposa (from the Castanets) but brighter, resonating at a higher timber. Whether or not the warble of either vocalists is in part an affectation to fit the sound of the genre is really irrelevant to me. I dig it because it is damn beautiful. Milia loves to rhyme, and despite my expectation that its aggressive use would wear on me, it usually works. He concludes "Dark Autumn Hour":

Tearing moons, these moons are tearing
Swearing terror inside their daring,
Crumbling prayers, dark autumns faring,
Straight out of our hands

At first look it seems like he just threw together a bunch of rhyming euphony without much attention to making sense or telling a narrative, but in the context of the rest of the song these lines do outline the ghost of an image-experience, which for me illustrates the dark autumn of a love lost. Of course this kind of ambiguity elicits the fetishizing tendency in all of us; and to be honest I still have no idea why the songwriter means by "swearing terror inside their daring." In any case, Milia's lyrics can be and often are as vivid as poetry and certainly as sonically interesting.

"The Blood(demo)": the wilderness prophet-lover heralds us all the dove.
"Dark Autumn Hour": The dark autumn of a love lost?
"Christmas Eve, Driving Home": Christmas is over, but I'm still playing this (Another tune selected by those Asthmatic Kitty elves).



1.God bless the man who starts on the saw, moves to melodica, and ends with the trumpet.
2. Melodicas and harmonicas make a great team.
3. Beards!

Visit their myspace and website for additional downloads.

Oh and since I made the comparison, here is a glory-bound Castanets song available for free at last.fm: "This Early in the Game"