If you’ve got a literary group gathered for Bible study—poetry fans, college students, or advanced English high school students, I’m accepting commissions to write a Bible study series based on Milton & the Devils Party’s What Is All This Sweet Work Worth?. A concept album of sorts, the band envisions Milton as prophetically writing his Paradise Lost with all of the snarl, riffs, and smashing drums of rock ‘n’ roll. What emerges is a modern tale that places the fall of Adam and Eve in the context of today’s situational sinful drama comedy called life.
The music jumps up and makes you jump up on its indie rock of catchy 60’s harmonies and hooks, rockabilly bass, and folk-flecked pop. Lead singer/English professor/bass player Daniel Robinson sings with that unpolished crack of Jonathan Rundman, while also channeling Elvis Costello, Mood Elevator, Adrian Belew, R.E.M., Glenn Tilbrook, Crowded House, and Spearmint.
“Have You Been Around?” gets at how we’re really not so comfortable with someone who has to say “no” when asked: “Can you count on one hand your lovers?” Free love and free sex are the buzz words that lead our decisions, but really, we want innocence, purity, fidelity, and trust—“And all the things we’ve lost, we’ll never get back.”
“Nude for Satan” exposes the lies Satan sells when leading people to leave behind their inibitions and engage in sexual exhibitions. Robinson and fellow band mate/English professor Mark Graybill (guitarist) claim that Milton chaffed at America’s Puritanical approach to sex, and so this song tries to shake off the guilt, making nudity OK again since Adam and Eve grabbed those fig leaves. Try as we might, though, there’s an innate knowledge of God’s Law in all of us, and the song’s sarcasm about being proud to be nude for Satan and not accepting the blame and guilt only seems to point out the lack of true peace we have if we follow our sinful plans to strip at the devil’s behest.
“Heathen Eden” could be a retelling of Milton’s retelling of the fall in the Garden of Eden, but it also works for today’s men who catch themselves wandering in their minds, a tryst only a few steps away, and the trigger from fantasy to action is the selfish pride.
It was love at first sin
In this heathen Eden
And he likes the ladies
And he likes his wife (she’s okay)
And he’d like some babies
But he loves this life
Here’s a song that doesn’t let the fantasy continue; rather it makes you face up to the fact that you want both worlds—fidelity and stability and family, but also you’d like to be the playboy. You can’t have both, even in this heathen Eden, because it will soon fall apart under the guilt of knowing you’ve walked away from what God wanted from you.
Thanks to Milton & the Devils Party for the review CD.
