Caspar Milquetoast - From the Cheap Seats EP
Caspar Milquetoast makes heartfelt music with From The Cheap Seats. Bee Delores writes that it's a remarkable debut.
Cartoonist H.T. Webster drew a character named Caspar Milquetoast for his 1924 comic, The Timid Soul. Webster, or "Webby" to his friends, once described Caspar as someone who "speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick.”Alt-country four-piece Caspar Milquetoast fuse the character's sensitive sensibility into their own lyrically fang-toothed debut EP, From the Cheap Seats.
There's no mistaking their thematic brashness for anybody else's, as they revel in their truth like pigs in the mud. The band - Gillian Pasley (singer-songwriter), Leah Bertrand (synth), Jordan Smith (bass), and Andrew Quinlan (drums) - often twist together static noise ("Karen Dalton Says") with soft country & western tears ("Cy Twombly," "Bathtub") and the thump-thump of a choir of heartbeats ("Airplane"). With the deceptively jaunty "Rodeo Clown," CM unravels sorrowful tales about downtrodden spirits that vibrate on the airdrums.
As far as debuts go, From the Cheap Seats cannonballs into the alt-country scene with the force of a two-ton anvil. It's a surprise that this is only the quartet's first outing. Their musical chemistry is electric across all five songs. It's as though they'd been doing this for decades together. Pasley, who's trained in poetry, uses her gifts to guide the ship, with her three collaborators tossing in their collective talents to sail onto the proverbial horizon.
It's just the start, but Caspar Milquetoast's From the Cheap Seats shows great promise. A wildly successful career stretches out before them. Now, it's time for them to take us for a ride.
