This is fucked up and amazing! It’s like a compilation album, with loads of artists, but done by the one; a great idea that you feel can’t work, but does and so gloriously well. The juxtaposed sense of sound and melody truly takes this record from the bars to the stars via cars driving very fast with stereos on full tilt, rocking in the free world, rocking in a new world, rocking in a new way. Each track stands alone and stands to the one next to it, the consistency of delivering great songs is evident from the moment the needle hits the groove.

It’s instructive and inventive, both future and fucked, but a modern record that will define and defy genre, this was not in the script for this band; from Kerrang! Hopefuls stars in waiting they have steered their ship through the metal wastelands and engaged the eNMEy within.

The album comes across like a modern day PIL record; they really need to get Mr Lydon to join them on a future toon! Best example of the marriage is track six ‘We Hope, You Are What You Think You Are’ which features Martin Grech and is an alternative monster making it’s way through the city at all costs to show you just what it means.

Inspired by the camaraderie of the DIY punk, post-punk and hardcore scenes that have gone before, the ‘guest starring’ culture of hip-hop and musical cross-referencing spirit of the 70s (when the likes of Fripp, Eno, Pop, Bowie et al would crop up on each others records), PRINT IS DEAD VOL 1 is a collaborative and conceptual work featuring contributions from members of some of the finest young guitar bands around.

At the centre of it are acclaimed forward-thinking Newcastle five-piece Yourcodenameis:MILO, who conceived the album in the wake of their acclaimed major label releases ALL ROADS TO FAULT (mini album 2004) and IGNOTO (debut album, 2005) and executed it with precision. The roll-call of guest is a Whose Who of all that is right with the contemporary British musical underbelly from fellow reigning Geordie triumvirate of Futureheads, Maximo Park and Field Music, through million-sellers Bloc Party and top 5 residents The Automatic, to emerging solo talents such as Tom Vek, Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly., and Lethal Bizzle.

“We were sitting around one night and thought; we have this great space for making music let’s use it…” says frontman Paul Mullen. “Within the band our influences are ridiculously wide - from Regina Spektor to Mastodon - so we sent out an e-mail to some bands we’d made friends with on our travels, inviting them to take part and it just snowballed from there. I think even Brian May and Brian Wilson were approached.”

The concept was a relatively simple one: Yourcodenameis:MILO invited their favourite kindred spirits in to write and record a song in a single day in the bands studio-cum-space. The end result after each session being what you hear on the album. “We’d pick our guests up at the train station and go back to the studio and form a band,” says Mullen, of the recording process. “We’d play around with ideas off the top of our head, then have some food and booze and discuss it. Then in the evening we’d record and mix, limiting ourselves to do each song in about fourteen hours. That way you avoid being too precious about the fine details and it becomes a true collaborative effort.”

It makes for a diverse, fluid and colourful collection, that’s unashamedly and wilfully difficult to pigeon-hole. Though painting from the same palette, the artists produce greatly differing results. On the one hand Futureheads’ Ross Millard offers the stop-start, folk-infused post-punk shanty ‘I Remember The Summer Isles’, on the other Lethal Bizzle brings the sound of LDN grime into play with a meditation on happy slapping, knife-happy culture on ‘Ordinary Day (sample line: “Yo Blair, yo Cameron, you dougnuts / Wake up and open your eyes, man.”). And somewhere in between sits the minimalist, rhythmic kabuki-esque instrumental offered by Maximo Park’s Lukas Wooller, or the almost dub-like ‘Tiny Vessels’ of Get Cape’s Sam Duckworth.

As a snapshot of a time (2005/2006) and a non-geographical specific place (inventive UK alt-rock), few records could better PRINT IS DEAD VOL. 1 in terms of broadness and creativity.

The album was recorded in between sessions for Yourcodenameis:MILO’s forthcoming second album and a recent memorable trip to play shows in New Delhi, India. Everything was written, recorded and mixed at their own studio under the arches of Byker Bridge and affectionately-named LIKE A CAT, LIKE A FOX (after the original title for their debut album).

Slowly but surely then Yourcodenameis:MILO are crystallising a scene based more around a mentality of spontaneity and creativity than a locale or fashion. Here is the first instalment. They will release their second full studio album early 2007; have set up their own General Recordings imprint through V2 and already begun work on more recordings for PRINT IS DEAD VOL II, as well as a number of Eno-inspired ambient works which may one day be released.

Yourcodenameis:MILO are: Paul Mullen (vocals/guitar), Justin Lockey (guitar), Adam Hiles (guitar), Ross Harley (bass) and Shaun Abbott (drums).

The best way to sum this up is thus: By the time you get to the last track on Vol 1, you have to press play from the start because you just want to hear Vol 2, but that’s not possible yet…

With thanks to Rich - ‘Cheers’ Rich!