How Wicked We've Become

Philadelphia's Milton & The Devil's Party is a rock band for thinking people. After three years of downplaying the fact that singer/songwriter/bassist Daniel Robinson and guitarist Mark Graybill happen to be English professors, the band has grown weary of apologizing for being who they are. After all, it was a love for the songwriting of such eggheads as Ray Davies (The Kinks), Morrissey, and Lloyd Cole that led him to start his first rock band, to major in English, and subsequently to become a professor of literature and with Graybill to found Milton and the Devils Party. How Wicked We've Become is their second album, and this time they've attracted a producer with an even nerdier curriculum vitae than theirs: as a Classics major, Brian McTear studied Virgil and Catullus in the original Latin. And not unimportantly, he has also produced and/or engineered brilliant albums by such luminaries as Apollo Sunshine, Espers, Danielson, Matt Pond PA, B.C. Camplight, Mazarin, and The A-Sides. So together, over eight intense days at Miner Street Recordings in Philadelphia, McTear and MDP got their geek on and completed what may be one of the finest albums of 2007. How Wicked We've Become is a considerably more mature and cohesive record than its predecessor--musically and thematically. McTear's expert guidance has opened up the band's previously dense sound to showcase Graybill's exquisite guitar work and to give the songs room to breathe--and they do breathe, alternately sighing and panting with longing and desire and continuing Robinson's interest in romantic collisions and cosmic loneliness.