Milksop Holly

Milkweeds (Shimmy Disc)
by Jamie Kiffel

Mara Flynn’s cello-sweet and smooth vibrato opens over every light guitar meandering on Milkweeds, which flits, flies, and drifts like soft, floaty, sweet and sappy milkweed pods aloft on a light wind. Every song on this disc follows a similar aerial route over Elysian fields, occasionally sticking to a high cattail the way those hard, little seeds do, with soft-spoken, “Tough-Knocks-Little-I am at the center of all this fluff” realizations such as “Shuffling aimlessly around Roy Rogers parking lot/and thinking of you” (in “Devil’s Advocate”) and “He called me last night from jail, bearing a Hershey’s kiss” (in “Hoboken Lament”). The milkweed lace dress of a spoiled suburban sweetheart mixed with her deep-felt, lightly depressive love poetry builds the small, tough ovum that bobs on air and lands where it will. With each song flying and falling within the same several midrange notes and words falling long on tone and short on meaning, this is like reading a privileged, teenage girl’s barely premenstrual diary, filled with wide-open deep thoughts that read as vague and tumultuous as the latest lipgloss. The Milksop atmosphere is filmy, fuzzy and flying female.
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