“Competing For Your Love” by Millions of Boys | Album Review

by Cory Kibler

For many of us in the 25-35 age range, bands such as Nirvana and Green Day were our gateway to college rock (which was eventually referred to as “alternative” and now, “indie”). Say what you want about Dookie, but from my vantage point, it stands as an incredibly infectious punk record that made me want to dig deeper and deeper into the used record bins.

From this point forward, many of us then discovered bands such as The Pixies, Pavement, Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, The Breeders, Sonic Youth and every other band amazing enough to make everyone else want to start a band so they could rip them off (your humble reviewer included). Mainly for this reason, I feel blessed to have come of age during the 1990s.

Millions of Boys’ goal appears to be to harness the properties of college rock, distill it and present it to an audience that probably hasn’t heard this pop-driven brand of the genre for at least 10 or 15 years. Their 10-song, 23-minute-long record, Competing For Your Love, is a love letter to a simpler "alternative" time.

It has all the hallmarks of alternative music from the aforementioned era: lo-fi production, fuzzy guitars, short and sweet songs, boy/girl harmonies and a self-aware sense of humor. Almost more than anything else, this sense of humor is what sets Millions of Boys apart from your average indie band. Whereas most indie bands seem to take themselves seriously to a fault, Millions of Boys aren’t afraid to be silly. They often seem like they are partly (or fully) joking, which makes them relatable and fun, rather than untouchable.

Competing For Your Love features a song called “Doug Flynn,” a sub-two-minute, half-spoken theme song for a local Omaha scene hero. It doesn’t sound like “Tony’s Theme” from The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, but it’s got the same “silly alternative rock song that’s partly a spoken-word superhero theme-song” vibe to it. And there’s also a song called “Sparky Mittens,” which is about a dog that runs away. Spoiler alert: The dog is named Sparky.

All of these tunes are melodic rock gems, but the track that snagged my ear immediately was "Margaret Maybe," a 1:48-long song that sounds like an outtake from the soundtrack to Suburbia (the 1997 film starring Giovanni Ribisi, not the early-'80s film of the same name). The beginning melody is so eerily familiar that at first, I began subconsciously trying to place which Breeders song I was hearing. It's a perfect and adorable alternative rock song.

The music is slacker guitar rock at its core; it is sometimes fun and bouncy, sometimes sad and wistful, and always hook-laden. Millions of Boys haven’t invented a new sound, but that doesn’t mean they’ve fallen short, either. On the contrary, they set their sights on creating an endearing and familiar brand of college rock stamped with their own particular approach, and they have succeeded.

Cory Kibler is a sensitive yet confident man of many skills. His band, The Sleepover, is obsessed with catchy alternative rock. He is taller than some, but shorter than many. It just makes him try that much harder.