Lovitt Records
Milemarker "Frigid Forms Sell" LP White (2000)
Regular price
$13.78
Details: Milemarker full-length, "Frigid Forms Sell," released on Lovitt Records (2000) on white vinyl. Comes with CD booklet as insert. White vinyl is very clean, no issues. Cover has wear around edges and corners/opening. As well shows bends on the front and wear on back from being improperly handled/stored by previous owner. See images.
Description: "While the world freaked out about Y2K, Milemarker boldly dragged synthesizers into post-hardcore.
Frigid Forms Sell came out in 2000, just as humankind was saying to itself, “Okay, the world didn’t end at Y2K. What now?” The album offered plenty of answers, none of them easy. “Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth” starts out with a techno intro full of robotic vocals and digitized beats before busting into a taut, staccato guitar riff—a clear echo of Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come, from which Milemarker was clearly picking up cues. But where Refused dressed up revolutionary theory and rhetoric, Milemarker went for something more intimate. “The symptoms they ascribed to venereal disease all these years / Turned out to be side effects of the magnetic strips on credit cards,” go the lyrics, and it’s the first clue that Frigid Forms Sell is going after a different target: consumerism, specifically where it intersects identity, technology, and sex.
The rest of the album bears that out brilliantly. The duo of “Sex Jam One: Sexual Machinery” and “Sex Jam Two: Insect Incest” bookend a harrowingly alienating vision of sexuality that’s underpinned by dissonance, skewed melody, and extended metaphor. Not to mention plenty of synthesizers, which help turn “Signal Froze”—sung in an android-like voice by keyboardist Roby Newton—into a nightmare scenario: “My SOS smoke signals froze / Clattered down in cloudy ice cubes.” The world is freezing over, she’s warning, and it’s starting inside each of us like a cancer. Her vocals on “Cryogenic Sleep” add to the song’s Portishead-in-Antarctica vibe, while “Tundra” is a duet with singer/bassist Al Burian that inhumanly, unemotionally observes, “You can’t outrun the tundra / So you might as well go under.”
Frostbitten and unnerving, Frigid Forms Sell calls to mind “Ice Age” by Joy Division, “Cold” by The Cure, or any number of other, early-80s post-punk songs that sought to evoke a state of icebound stasis, be it geological or emotional—all while mixing in Gang of Four’s take on the commodification and dehumanization of sex in a capitalist system, linking all these themes cleverly by the double meaning of the word “frigid.” Technology, the album drives home, is spreading across the face of civilization like a glacier. What does that mean for our relationships? Our identities? Our bodies?
As striking as Frigid Forms Sell is as a piece of music, its cover art is a work of genius that reflects the band’s concepts just as beautifully. Newton and drummer Sean Husick are pictured on the cover in red thermal undershirts, looking like fashion models—only coated with some kind of icy glaze. They both look gorgeous. It might be a little sketchy to openly salivate over the photos of band members on the cover of their album, but Milemarker was ostensibly inviting you to do so as if Husick and Newton were precisely the frigid forms being used to try to sell you Frigid Forms Sell. After a decade of dressed-down, austere, DIY economics—thanks mostly to the influence of Fugazi—a post-hardcore band flaunting its decadent sensuousness while ironically subverting it was nothing short of profound.
Frigid Forms Sell was a quantum leap for Milemarker—not necessarily in sales since the band remained staunchly underground, but strictly on the merit of being one of those right albums at the right time. They soon followed up with the 2001 album Aneaesthetic and the 2002 EP Satanic Versus, both of which continued Milemarker’s obsession with wordplay and social commentary. After that, the band became an intermittent affair; a 2005 album titled Ominosity was strong, but felt slightly unfocused and untethered in an entirely different cultural atmosphere.
So much had changed since 2000. Not long after, keyboards became routine in post-hardcore. Milemarker never got much credit for it, but they were pivotal in shifting the scene’s perspective when it came to a broader instrumental palette. From there, The Blood Brothers, The Faint, and countless others picked up and ran with that idea. At the same time, the delicious sense of cognitive dissonance that Milemarker cultivated was lost once keyboards became standard issues in post-hardcore. But it bears remembering how bracing, thought-provoking, abrasive, and downright oddball Frigid Forms Sell sounded on its release."--Jason Heller, Vice
Grade: VG (Cover) / NM (Record)
TRACK LISTING SIDE A:
A1. Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth
A2. Signal Froze
A3. Sex Jam One: Sexual Machinery
A4. Sex Jam Two: Insect Incest
A5. Cryogenic Sleep
TRACK LISTING SIDE B:
B1. Industry For The Blind
B2. Tundra
B3. Internet Relay Chat With The Central Intelligence Agency
B4. Server Error
B5. Platinum
Description: "While the world freaked out about Y2K, Milemarker boldly dragged synthesizers into post-hardcore.
Frigid Forms Sell came out in 2000, just as humankind was saying to itself, “Okay, the world didn’t end at Y2K. What now?” The album offered plenty of answers, none of them easy. “Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth” starts out with a techno intro full of robotic vocals and digitized beats before busting into a taut, staccato guitar riff—a clear echo of Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come, from which Milemarker was clearly picking up cues. But where Refused dressed up revolutionary theory and rhetoric, Milemarker went for something more intimate. “The symptoms they ascribed to venereal disease all these years / Turned out to be side effects of the magnetic strips on credit cards,” go the lyrics, and it’s the first clue that Frigid Forms Sell is going after a different target: consumerism, specifically where it intersects identity, technology, and sex.
The rest of the album bears that out brilliantly. The duo of “Sex Jam One: Sexual Machinery” and “Sex Jam Two: Insect Incest” bookend a harrowingly alienating vision of sexuality that’s underpinned by dissonance, skewed melody, and extended metaphor. Not to mention plenty of synthesizers, which help turn “Signal Froze”—sung in an android-like voice by keyboardist Roby Newton—into a nightmare scenario: “My SOS smoke signals froze / Clattered down in cloudy ice cubes.” The world is freezing over, she’s warning, and it’s starting inside each of us like a cancer. Her vocals on “Cryogenic Sleep” add to the song’s Portishead-in-Antarctica vibe, while “Tundra” is a duet with singer/bassist Al Burian that inhumanly, unemotionally observes, “You can’t outrun the tundra / So you might as well go under.”
Frostbitten and unnerving, Frigid Forms Sell calls to mind “Ice Age” by Joy Division, “Cold” by The Cure, or any number of other, early-80s post-punk songs that sought to evoke a state of icebound stasis, be it geological or emotional—all while mixing in Gang of Four’s take on the commodification and dehumanization of sex in a capitalist system, linking all these themes cleverly by the double meaning of the word “frigid.” Technology, the album drives home, is spreading across the face of civilization like a glacier. What does that mean for our relationships? Our identities? Our bodies?
As striking as Frigid Forms Sell is as a piece of music, its cover art is a work of genius that reflects the band’s concepts just as beautifully. Newton and drummer Sean Husick are pictured on the cover in red thermal undershirts, looking like fashion models—only coated with some kind of icy glaze. They both look gorgeous. It might be a little sketchy to openly salivate over the photos of band members on the cover of their album, but Milemarker was ostensibly inviting you to do so as if Husick and Newton were precisely the frigid forms being used to try to sell you Frigid Forms Sell. After a decade of dressed-down, austere, DIY economics—thanks mostly to the influence of Fugazi—a post-hardcore band flaunting its decadent sensuousness while ironically subverting it was nothing short of profound.
Frigid Forms Sell was a quantum leap for Milemarker—not necessarily in sales since the band remained staunchly underground, but strictly on the merit of being one of those right albums at the right time. They soon followed up with the 2001 album Aneaesthetic and the 2002 EP Satanic Versus, both of which continued Milemarker’s obsession with wordplay and social commentary. After that, the band became an intermittent affair; a 2005 album titled Ominosity was strong, but felt slightly unfocused and untethered in an entirely different cultural atmosphere.
So much had changed since 2000. Not long after, keyboards became routine in post-hardcore. Milemarker never got much credit for it, but they were pivotal in shifting the scene’s perspective when it came to a broader instrumental palette. From there, The Blood Brothers, The Faint, and countless others picked up and ran with that idea. At the same time, the delicious sense of cognitive dissonance that Milemarker cultivated was lost once keyboards became standard issues in post-hardcore. But it bears remembering how bracing, thought-provoking, abrasive, and downright oddball Frigid Forms Sell sounded on its release."--Jason Heller, Vice
Grade: VG (Cover) / NM (Record)
TRACK LISTING SIDE A:
A1. Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth
A2. Signal Froze
A3. Sex Jam One: Sexual Machinery
A4. Sex Jam Two: Insect Incest
A5. Cryogenic Sleep
TRACK LISTING SIDE B:
B1. Industry For The Blind
B2. Tundra
B3. Internet Relay Chat With The Central Intelligence Agency
B4. Server Error
B5. Platinum