Matthew Milia of Frontier Ruckus Announces Debut Solo Album

Detroit musician and songwriter Matthew Milia is thrilled to announce his debut album Alone at St. Hugo, out May 3, 2019 on Sitcom Universe Records. Recorded on a Tascam 388 reel to reel tape machine in a small Ypsilanti, Michigan spare room, the record captures the sound of two friends setting out to find a harmony-laden, power pop backdrop for Milia's signature lyricism. Milia's poetic songwriting has previously won praise from the likes of Gold Flake Paint who wrote that, "Milia is straight-up one of the most underrated lyricists of recent times," and Rolling Stone who mused that "the haunting voice of Matthew Milia conjures what might happen had Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum been raised in a log cabin."

Today Milia shares the first single off Alone at St. Hugo. The lyric video for "Puncture" features family photos from Milia's childhood, emphasizing the twinge of nostalgia flowing throughout the tapestries he paints with his songs. Milia will play an album release show at The Loving Touch in Ferndale, MI on May 3rd with special guest Anna Burch, and travel to New York City for a show at Mercury Lounge on May 14th. More tour dates TBA in the coming weeks.

Pre-order Alone at St. Hugo - https://goo.gl/d1JhpP

Vinyl + Cassette pre-order coming soon

Known for his thematic obsession on memory, domestic minutiae, suburban redundancy, and the fragility of family dynamics, Frontier Ruckus' Milia has written over 100 songs constructing an intricate personal mythology based in his lifelong home of Detroit, Michigan. His debut solo album, Alone at St. Hugo takes a bedroom-fi analog approach, resulting in something both classically lush and intimately raw at once.

Each track began with Milia on guitar and Ben Collins on drums, playing live in the room together. From there, they divided a small galaxy of overdub responsibilities between themselves evenly-mellotron, pedal steel, Hammond organ, cello, mandolin, and horns being a few of the textures wrangled in giddy, all-night sessions. Coupled with vocal layers verging on Big Star grandeur, the most poignant aspect of the musicality's sweetness is the foil it serves to Milia's vocabulary of domestic American heaviness-a world of decaying suburban landscapes and the desperate hope still residing therein.

Alone at St. Hugo at its core is a set of finely honed songs-a dense but deliberate catalog where memory is obsessed upon. A cast of waitresses, youth soccer coaches, grandparents, and young lovers occupying the ailing station wagons and birthday banquet halls in which these songs reside. Milia sings about real human beings in all of their glorious mundanity. Perhaps he is singing there alone, in St. Hugo, the Catholic grade school he attended from K-8. The way a selection of our memories will ring forever in some evacuated mental building, lights-out in endless night. But through it all, a wry sense of humor winks its way through the pathos, atop chord changes displaying a level of precision and classic craft uncommon to the habits of today's songwriters.

To post a comment, you must register and login.