| Scottish McMillan is a disciple of the
manic guitar-picking school of Leo Kottke, from which he borrows a fast-strumming,
fast-picking style of rapid rhythmic fits and starts, which causes most mere mortals to
lose complete track of whether the pick is coming or going, pickin' or astrummin'.
Meanwhile, instead of merely singing a steady melody over the ever-changing bed of rhythm,
McMillan flat-out becomes the rhythm. One measure he's yelping like a Scottish Terrier,
the next measure he's spitting out half-spoken wisecracks, the next he's bellowing or
whistling, the next he's slow-dancing a dirge.
And, equally impressively, McMillan the manic Man-Rhythm is also McMillan the drummer,
bass guitarist, baritone guitarist, one-man-band.
He may be Scottish, but McMillan's Midwest-accented voice (vaguely reminiscent of Don
Conoscenti, or Bruce Cockburn in his upper register) doesn't sound much like Scotland.
Outside of a fondness for acoustics, the music on this cleverly titled Vice Verses
album doesn't draw much from the land of bagpipe and reel either.
He surrounds his manic acoustic guitar with an array of other sounds: slide guitar; funky
Red Hot Chilli Peppered bass; bubbly electric guitar that will remind most fans of Paul
Simon's Graceland; thick fuzzy electric guitar buzz; an Andy Stochansky-style layer of
manic percussion forever underneath. And almost all of it he plays himself.
Don't let the dull cover art fool you; or the fact that McMillan's gigging has been
limited mostly to a (large) variety of Chicago and Indiana clubs. To these ears at least,
he sounds deserving of a broader audience.
McMillan's rhythmic guitar playing is very similar to that of the widely traveled,
talented Boston-based funk-folk poet Peter Mulvey, who is also a student of the School of
Kottke. McMillan's songwriting is more simple and less ambitious than Mulvey's Waits- and
DiFranco-influenced brand of cerebral urban poetry. Less urbane reflection, more
plain-spoken cleverness.
But if ever McMillan's unpretentious clever upbeat word choices lack anything in
complexity or profundity, he more than covers up the deficit in the ingenuity of
arrangement. You won't care much what he's singing, but when you come out of the daze of
trying to follow all the hyper chord and rhythmic changes, you'll find he's been singing
some pretty entertaining lines, too.
Upflifting, chuckle-provoking, occasionally even moving. With all the right phrases
perfectly punctuated by sudden bellows and howls.
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