Album Of The Week: Milk Music Cruise Your Illusion

When people describe Olympia, Washington, they usually talk about it as a deep-wooded, weeded-out hippie enclave, but I'm not sure they get across how much of a deep-wooded, weeded-out hippie enclave it really is. I spent a week there with friends nearly a decade ago, and by the time I flew back to Baltimore, I felt like I'd met the whole town. Everyone I met had some kind of menial, possibly dehumanizing job -- kitchen work, phone sex -- but none of those jobs seemed to run their lives the way jobs ran people's lives back east. I spent entire days there high out of my mind, staring up at the sky, and that seemed to be the way things operated there. When I was shopping at the local thrift shop/record store, the clerk's mother called to wish her a happy Easter, and her response was this: "Mom, you're Buddhist! How brainwashed are you?" Maybe my limited experience gave me a skewed image of the place, but Olympia, to me, seemed more Portland than Portland. It doesn't seem like the sort of place you need to escape from. But the burnouts in the Olympia band Milk Music apparently disagree.