Milk Maid - Yucca

Being awarded the prestige of NME's No 1 Radar Buzz band is a good place to start for any album campaign, and for ex Nine Black Alps bassist Martin Cohen, that's exactly the position his new band Milk Maid stand in.

It's a strong position, and one the band make clear to capitalise on with their full length debut Yucca. Almost drowning in the fuzz of lo-fi production, perhaps the most surprising element is the album's tendency towards pop hooks. Lead single Not Me and the 60s inspired charm of Dead Wrong resound with a real determination, one that those hooks propels into the album's greatest strength.

For the most part, Yucca plays out to march-like beats and a thoroughly grungy, dirty guitar throb that sounds as if its being piped in from the stereo of a battered old Ford Cortina. Recorded in Cohen's flat, Yucca holds that singular aspect to it - a pure envisionment of what the band stand for. Although, clearly in this case, 'pure' means drenched in distortion.

That said, a smattering of the softer moments on the album stand out as some of the best work here - like the lovely little acoustic dittie Same As What. It's moments like this that Cohen's songwriting talents are really allowed to shine through. Precise and delicate in their trembling intimacy, these songs act as a gateway to the urban landscapes of the band's youth - the grey concrete and tarmac mass.

If anything, Yucca is an album that always reassures in its solidity - nothing is ever done in half measures. In the squealing guitar solos of Back Of Your Knees, it bludgeons its way into our senses - a physical wall of towering reverb.

And then comes the more languid, dark lyricism of Can't You See and Someone You Thought You'd Forgot - here we see the real squalor of the streets that surround us all, the tracks squeezed by the tedium and claustrophobia of modern life. Tight and compressed, rough and ready, Yucca is an album that finds new meaning in the viscerality of lo-fi.

Yucca is available to download from iTunes now.