Milksop: Unsung Returns From The Grave

On Halloween night, a band rose from the dead.

On Dec. 18 of last year, at Best Video, Milksop: Unsung played what the band members declared to be the group’s final show, and they seemed to mean it. So it was a surprise to discover that the group was reuniting for a show at Cafe Nine on Oct. 31, supported by Xavier Serrano (of Kindred Queer) and Dr. Caterwaul’s Cadre of Clairvoyant Claptraps.

And so people came out. They were there, some in costume, some arriving from work, for Serrano’s haunted solo set, from the moment the house music dropped and Serrano plugged in his guitar to play. In between that scratch of static and the first words from Serrano’s mouth, there was not a sound.

“I like the attention,” Serrano joked, and pointed to his tunic. ​“This is a costume on a budget,” he said.

His easygoing demeanor balanced his moody, evocative set, pulled from originals and songs by friends alike. Enough of the crowd stayed for the entire night, even to make Dr. Caterwaul’s feel welcome as they closed out the bill’s entertainment. (Full disclosure: Your correspondent plays in this group).

But the night belonged to Milksop; the crowd was at its biggest for them, as it should have been. After all, how often does anyone get to see a band come back from the grave?

The reanimated Milksop tore through a long set of its material, including selections from their 2014 album coldfriendlyhell. Their mmebers’ hiatus didn’t seem to affect them any more than the appearance of new bass player Greg Perault, who sounded like he’d been playing the songs for years. Drummer Michael Paolucci laid down rhythms as tight as ever, guiding the Milksop’s knotty tunes through their texture, tempo, and meter changes with ease. And Dan Carrano (vocals, mandolin, and guitar) and TJ Jackson (vocals, guitar, banjo) ably navigated twisty lyrics and unexpected chord changes to produce the high-energy show that their fans hoped for. The band members’ humor was in full force as well, as Carrano, Jackson, and Perault slung jokes at the audience and themselves. They appeared initially in superhero domino masks, which Carrano pulled off his face soon into the band’s set.

“Who can fight crime in these?” he said.

Fans who had never expected to see the band again hopped in front of the stage to the particular blend of frantic two steps and carnivalesque waltz tempos that drove song after song, until the band finally declared their last song only to break out an encore at the crowd’s insistence.

A unicorn danced with a witch, a prince, and princess. As the night continued, that dancing got a little more aggressive, until they were tossing and shoving each other around in front of the stage.

“This is what Halloween should be like,” one of them said. ​“Unicorn moshing.” And then dove straight into the next song.