The lyrics of Jellyfish songs launch them from great pop songs to musical poetry. Words snap together like candy-color Lego blocks. The phrases “chalk line dollar sign,” and “dialog swam from his pen like pollywogs” won’t ever fail to give me the chills.
But on my first listens, the opening track, “Hush,” a mostly-acapella lullaby, and “Sebrina, Paste, and Plato,” a lighter-than-clouds track about an elementary-school crush that could have been the theme song for a carousel, had me wondering what the hell was going on here. Even songs I anticipated being pure power pop veered into very different territory. “Bye, Bye, Bye” began as a vocal harmony and building drums, then at 30 seconds, turned into…a polka?
The album was obviously beautifully written and impeccably produced, but I couldn’t latch on, and I felt terrible about that. I wasn’t willing, however, to proclaim that I didn’t like Spilt Milk. I kept listening out of general devotion and a large dose of guilt.
Things finally clicked for me three years or so later, long after the band’s breakup. Spilt Milk was what I loved about Bellybutton, exploded and spooled out to its logical conclusion. I saw the quasi-concept album in the madness, the circus-like sounds over the funhouse-mirror imagery of broken relationships, disillusionment and cyclical family dysfunction. Strands of this DNA have shown up in Melanie Martinez’s cracked childhood lyrics and sad babydoll aesthetic of the last decade.
Spilt Milk’s bedtime lullaby kickoff and “Brighter Day” closing makes it the nighttime counterpart to XTC’s Skylarking, which starts with the bird-chirping gentle wake-up of “Summer’s Cauldron,” cycles through a metaphorical lifetime, and ends with the evening ritual of “Sacrificial Bonfire.” They both linger in the details of everyday lives and point the finger at religion as the culprit for any number of humanity’s issues, but XTC ultimately holds the little guy up as heroic (just barely), whereas the characters who inhabit Spilt Milk seem to haplessly trip over their own yearnings and desire to put others on pedestals. The Andys–Partridge and Sturmer–are the outsized ringmasters.
I’ve come to appreciate the sudden tone shifts of Milk, like when “All is Forgiven” builds to an angry crescendo – a wall of guitar and drums – that screeches to a halt before crashing into “Russian Hill,” one of the most laid-back Jellyfish songs. The array of instruments used on the album makes me imagine a dust-covered music shop in a picturesque valley in the Alps, run by a dusty, lovable old man. Andy Sturmer, Roger and Chris Manning, Jason Faulkner, Tim Smith and Eric Dover arrive (yes, yes, I know – but it’s my scenario and I want them all there) to buy up his vintage wonders – wind chimes! Harpsichord! Glockenspiel! It gives the album the feel of a chaotic miniature diorama where every splinter has been carefully arranged with tweezers. From: https://rockandrollglobe.com/rock/best-wishes-simpleton-30-years-of-jellyfishs-spilt-milk/
