MILK 'N' COOKIES - Box Set

Essential 2CD/3LP set that reissues long lost NY proto power-pop band. Pretty much every song sounds like a hit even now. We love it. You will, too.

"Milk 'N' Cookies are the latest such group to benefit from this history-revising eye. They formed in the early 1970s in Woodmere, Long Island, a short drive from the bustling proto-punk scene in New York City, where the New York Dolls reigned supreme and their brand of glam-influenced gutter rock was already beginning to burn out under its own brilliance. While most of the local bands around them were steeped in stadium rock, Milk 'N' Cookies, still in their teens, decided to record 4-track songs influenced by the British glitter rock of the era—T. Rex, Bowie, Sweet, Roxy Music, et al.—and perhaps unwittingly became precursors to U.S. power pop. They have a major hand in creating the "tough glam" aesthetic, a sort of blend of UK androgyny, N.Y. grit and L.A. glamour that continued to rear its sequined head from the New Romantics to hair metal to Britpop, and beyond.

In their very first photo shoot, Milk 'N' Cookies sport long manes of brown hair, wearing novelty bowties and clutching teddy bears, yet the songs compiled on their first LP, reissued here by Captured Tracks, are all about girls, sex, and letting loose, still slightly scandalous subjects for suburban America at that point. Frontman Justin Strauss uses a sing-song, breathy voice, like a lovesick schoolboy taunting his crush on the playground. It's not emasculating at all, more of an assertion of desire that makes every Milk 'N' Cookies song seem ripped from a teenager's diary (which they very well may have been)." - Pitchfork