Vinyl Release

It’s a crime, that’s what it is! An absolute outrage! Chances are you feel the same way as I do about a favourite album that no one else in the world seems to give a fig for. I’m not talking about the one that reminds you of your first date or some other sentimental attachment. I’m referring to the LP that was released into an uncaring world and inexplicably ignored when, by every measure you employ to judge a record’s artistic worth, it should have been embraced, applauded, lauded and been top of the charts for weeks on end.

Sink Or Swim
I have a few of these great-unloveds in my record collection but at the pinnacle of the pile, unchallenged in its baffling ignominy, stands Spilt Milk, the second album from San Francisco’s Jellyfish. It came out to no fanfare whatsoever in February 1993 via Charisma and pretty much sank without trace, a titanic commercial disaster that eventually took the band down with it.

They split when it was over, never to return – which is totally absurd because Spilt Milk is near-as-dammit the most perfect album ever made. It’s meticulously assembled from unimpeachable influences, expertly played with astonishing verve, stunningly produced and full of gleaming, intelligent songs. How on earth could it fail?

When they began work across studios in Los Angeles in late 1991, the band were in a pretty good place, reputation-wise. After all, their debut LP, Bellybutton, had done reasonable business, garnered enthusiastic reviews and was easily the match for such groovy contemporaries as, say, The Spin Doctors. Jellyfish had a quirky hippie charm to them, a look that was a kind of a glam take on Scooby-Doo, which suggested a sly and playful sense of humour.

Priced £29.99 plus shipping, the 180g reissue of Spilt Milk by Jellyfish is available at www.udiscovermusic.com

Curated Collection
Most importantly, abundant talent was shared between founding members Andy Sturmer who sang, played drums and wrote the words, and keyboardist and tunesmith Roger Manning. They’d shed the rest of the band after the first LP and, with the help of co-producers Jack Joseph Puig and Albhy Galuten, hired choice session players in their quest to make something extraordinary, an album that fed off and modernised all the music they’d discovered on FM radio while growing up.

I’m determined not to lean on that lazy cliché – ‘If you like that you’ll like this’ – but it’s impossible to avoid name-dropping when appreciating the vision and scope of Spilt Milk because it deliberately sounds like all the best bits of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac, Cheap Trick, Queen, 10cc and Dreamer-era Supertramp to list but a few. You could say, without too much fear of contradiction, that Spilt Milk was curated rather than created, its every polished note having been heard before on one classic album or another. Yet the genius of it is that it all sounds fresh and brand new.

‘We really take pride in exploring the arrangements’, said Manning at the time. ‘Our strength is in incorporating a lot of different things and twisting them in a way that they haven’t been twisted before.’

Apart from its obsessive nature and determination to be utterly brilliant, what exactly is Spilt Milk all about? Well, there are a few fanboys online who consider it a concept album about the power, glory and precarious fragility of the band’s chosen career – pop about pop, if you like. And certainly there’s a fair amount of truth in that. ‘The Ghost At Number One’ and ‘Joining A Fan Club’ both cast a cynical eye over the machinations of the record business, and it’s easy to see why one might consider the album to be based around the story of a young girl called Sebrina who appears to be the daughter of a famous rock star, will grow up to marry another rock star, and have a child who will become yet another one.

Omnivore Records press shot of Jellyfish in 1994 (l-r) Roger Manning, Andy Sturmer, Tim Smith and Eric Dover and (inset) label of the original LP release on Charisma

Frankly Speaking
But when you hear ‘He’s My Best Friend’, which – and there’s no beating around the bush about it – is all about the subject of autoeroticism, the concept album idea falls away. Meanwhile, ‘Sebrina, Paste, And Plato’ is a kind of kids’ cartoon classroom skit, ‘New Mistake’ is about falling in love and becoming an un-planned parent, and ‘Russian Hill’... well, someone once accurately described this track as Nick Drake meets Frank Sinatra.

I reckon the reason some are tempted to suggest a unifying, thematic whole is that it all sounds so adoringly done and beautifully presented. There’s not a semi-quaver out of place, not one track that’s superior to any other, no favourites, no clunkers. Every chorus is an ear-worm, the whole album pin-point poised dynamically and manufactured on a par with the famously fastidious Steely Dan when it comes to insistence on perfection.

The 1993 Spilt Milk tour lineup (l-r) Sturmer, Smith, Manning and Dover

Too Good To Be True?
And therein, perhaps, lay the album’s downfall. There’s an unwritten law about the art of popular music which says, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, that there’s a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in. The pursuit, and worse, the actual delivery of perfection is looked upon with suspicion in a medium that is often highly valued for its artists displaying their vulnerabilities, fraying at the edges.

Spilt Milk, on the other hand, is just too faultless to be trusted as truly real in any era – artifice rather than art – let alone its exuberance being unleashed in the early 1990s when the popular emergence of grunge and heavy rap established the mopey downside and macho posturing as the critically favoured cool options.

Let’s put it this way: if Nevermind is Edvard Munch and OK Computer is Picasso, then Spilt Milk is Michelangelo.

Timeless yet out of time, happy to wear its influences on its sleeve and forgo all the established tenuous illusions and sleights of shaky hand that pose to signify originality, Jellyfish’s sophomore album was ignored precisely because of its brilliance. Its trifecta of great songwriting, world-class musicianship, and dazzling recording and engineering were not what the music doctor was ordering in 1992.

But here’s the thing: you know the Tenacious D track ‘Tribute’ where Jack and Kyle meet Dave Grohl’s devil and he says they have to play him the best song in the world or he’ll eat their souls? They actually do it but later can’t remember how this song went, hence the track being a tribute to the lost work. Well, pick any song from Spilt Milk and there you actually have it.

Re-Release Verdict
Both Spilt Milk and the band’s 1990 debut album Bellybutton were reissued on 180g black vinyl late in 2023. UMe’s release for the former [B0038609-01] is described as a ‘30th Anniversary edition’ while being ‘cut from the original analog master tapes’, and features a gatefold sleeve. Jellyfish completists might also want to pick up Omnivore’s 2015 double-CD release of Spilt Milk [OVCD-6], which adds demo versions and live performances of the album’s dozen tracks.

Sound Quality: 90%