ALBUM REVIEW: Free Milk – Tijuana Bibles
Touted as a Scottish IDLES, TIJUANA BIBLES blend full frontal assaults with alluring vocals and lyrics that look to provoke unique thoughts in the mind of listeners. The Glaswegian quartet have been around for almost a decade which has seen them tour across Europe and make appearances at festivals like Reading & Leeds. But are the “Scottish version of IDLES” all they’re cracked up to be?
One thing is clear as soon as the first track Stateless rings out, TIJUANA BIBLES aren’t a post-punk band and comparing them to IDLES isn’t fair to them at all. There’s far too much nuance in their songwriting and its aesthetic to compare them to a band that they do nothing similar to. Free Milk is largely inspired by their hometown of Glasgow; each song embodies a different aspect of the city and applies it to the intense noir feeling of their sound. It’s quite a complex mission to be able to make music that will be identifiable with an iconic location without just the use of an accent, and TIJUANA BIBLES are close to achieving that.
They’re an indie rock band that lean on the slightly heavier side of that genre and like a healthy dose of reverb, and their influences are easily identifiable; frontman Tony Costello does his best Alex Turner impression for his vocal delivery and a pretty good one at that. Jokes aside, his vocals are a massive part in adding to the atmosphere of the often dark and gloomy aesthetic of Glasgow.
The Wave runs on adrenaline that treads the line between stupidity and being just close enough to danger to pump life through your veins faster than ever before; Stateless is the first impression that the quartet decide to leave you with — a cacophony that takes you by storm. Pariah boasts writing that clearly pulls from the likes of ARCTIC MONKEYS’ Humbug, at times bringing in perplexing ways to think about someone but also being introspectively deprecating.
Their quality ceiling hits its limit just before the end of the record; Slip Into The Leather is alluring in all of the right ways, sneaking in this element of sultry into the album without it feeling out of place or wrong, Costello’s vocals playing into it all the more whilst the idea of leather and bondage is at the forefront of your mind, ultimately making it a sexy rock track without trying too hard or using overt eroticism to a point of discomfort like certain other bands.
They’ve been misframed and that’s a shame; it’s a recurring instance ever since IDLES rose to the level of popularity that they’re at now that every band that sound even a tiny bit like IDLES — even if they don’t — must be a post-punk band which makes even less sense since the Bristol quintet were never much of a post-punk band themselves. It’s a lazy narrative that people feel they can apply like a bandaid and ultimately blurs what post-punk is as a genre unnecessarily. TIJUANA BIBLES aren’t post-punk, but their songwriting is going to take them to a place much further than where they are now and when it does, post-punk still won’t be a one size fits all label.
Rating: 7/10
Free Milk is set for release on December 8th via Button Up Records.
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