by David Lefkowitz (@gymshortsdave)
On this, their sixth studio album under the Milk Carton moniker, the Indie-folk mainstays and titans of yearning feel more themselves than ever before. The last two albums have been a bit of a meander for The Milk Carton Kids. The band’s opening trilogy was suit-and-tie acoustic fare, an approach so straightforward it was unique in its simplicity. They were a duo that was really a quintet, a band comprised of singer/songwriters Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale, their guitars (a 1951 Gibson J-45 and a perpetually-handkerchiefed 1954 Martin 0-15, respectively), and you, sitting there between your headphones. Their fourth and fifth albums broke from the sonic blueprint of their earlier work. Suddenly, The Milk Carton Kids had electric guitars and denim shirts. It was a bold new direction and a necessary experimentation, even if – honestly – it wasn’t their best work.
I Only See the Moon returns to the tried-and-true form of their first three albums but learns from the mistakes of their next two, even as it shifts the experience. It feels like a first-person account of what it’s like to be The Milk Carton Kids’ microphone – right in your ears, Pattengale stage left, Ryan stage right. On Prologue, they’re singing straight to you, sitting in front of them. On All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do, their fourth and most expansive LP, they’re singing to you out in an audience somewhere. On I Only See the Moon, it hardly feels like they’re singing to you at all. They’ve been doing this a good while now, and they’ve proven all they have to prove. If anything, Ryan and Pattengale sound on this record like they’re singing to each other, or maybe just themselves. These are songs for no one, and they are wonderful. Acoustic Zen.
The cornerstone MCK components are all there – Pattengale’s frantic, shoulder-rolling cross picking, Ryan’s rock-solid rhythm work, the singular flow of their voices in harmony. Lyrically, though, the record finds itself on another level. “Star Shine” is one of their best songs to date, and “Body & Soul” fulfills the ‘One Fun Song’ quota observed on their previous albums.
There’s more to I Only See the Moon than just two guitars and two voices, however. Orchestral strings, church organ, and clawhammer banjo populate over half of the album’s ten tracks, and the opening track features choral vocals that can only be described as Isakov-esque. The 20-piece string accompaniment on the title track is cinematic, not only in its instrumentation but in the harmony itself. The final result – balancing the dense, almost achingly saccharine chords, the winding progress of the arrangement, and the solitary, crooning vocals (the only song on the record to feature just one of their voices) – comes off more old Hollywood than Indie Americana.
Ryan and Pattengale sound more themselves than ever on this record, but that sound has evolved. I Only See the Moon represents a massive step forward for the duo not because they’re doing more, but because they’re doing more with less. The Milk Carton Kids, it seems, are growing up.