At the Turn of the Millennium, Milemarker Embraced a Synthetic Future

In our smug, infinite, 21st-century wisdom, we love to look back and laugh at the phenomenon known as Y2K. That is, when we remember Y2K at all. The unease that gripped some parts of the population during the months leading up to January 1, 2000, is well documented: Endless speculation abounded about the possibility of a worldwide technological crash, which in turn stirred up all the latent apocalyptic fear-mongering—both political and pop-cultural—that we’d been absorbing throughout the late 20th century. We barfed it all back up during the Y2K hysteria, although hysteria is overstating the case. Sure, some people stockpiled toilet paper and ammunition. For most of us, though, we just kind of laughed snidely and suppressed our angst at what the unknown future might bring. Not Milemarker, though. While the world tried to play it cool, they played it colder.

Before the release of their third album, Frigid Forms Sell—which is being reissued this month—Milemarker was a middle-of-the-road post-hardcore band, barely distinguishable from a hundred others across the country. But early on, there were already glimpses of the group’s conceptual restlessness, most notably on their 1998 album Future Ism. While the record doesn’t sound half as futurist as the name would imply, tracks like “New Lexicon” worked synthesizers into the standardized, Fugazi-meets-Drive Like Jehu template of 90s post-hardcore. Of course, they weren’t the first band to splice synths into post-hardcore’s DNA. In Boulder (and later, San Francisco), The VSS did something similar, and in San Diego, bands like Antioch Arrow and The Locust were using keyboards in the pursuit of new mutations of noise.

This rise in the use of keyboards was partly a reaction to the hardcore scene’s unspoken notion that the guitars-bass-drums paradigm was the default setting for some kind of punk authenticity. Punks in the 70s mostly avoided keyboards because those machines were associated with punk’s arch-nemesis, progressive rock. Hardcore bands in the 80s did the same, seeing as keyboards were associated with New Romantic and synth-pop bands like Duran Duran and Depeche Mode. Synthesizers, in the eyes of scene, symbolized falseness, hollowness, soullessness, coldness—in other words, exactly the ideas that Milemarker tackled head-on in Frigid Forms Sell. Only instead of trying to embody the antithesis of synthetic coldness by playing hot, messy, organic, cathartic rock, they decided to slip inside the enemy’s icy skin.

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 were 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 were 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 issue in post-hardcore. But it bears remembering how bracing, thought-provoking, abrasive, and downright oddball Frigid Forms Sell sounded on its release.

In some ways, Frigid Forms Sell is tied to its time—not dated necessarily, as it’s still powerful and relevant, but fixated on certain influences and issues that packed more of a punch as Y2K was rearing its head. Milemarker reformed recently in Berlin, where Burian and guitarist Dave Laney now live, and they even have a new album, Overseas, due in August. It’s good, too, a worthy addition to their discography that integrates electronic music far more smoothly than anything they’ve done before. But it doesn’t have that zeitgeist-capturing gravitas of Frigid Forms Sell, a record that exemplified the punk scene as it pivoted from one millennium—and one way of viewing how we interface with machines and each other—to the next.

Jason Heller is on Twitter - @jason_m_heller