(Colorado Daily)

If the cold war taught the world anything, it’s that there are definitely fates worse than death.

In the beginning at least, that doesn’t seem to have been the case. Families excavated their backyards, dropping concrete homes into great holes and stocking them with canned goods and evaporated milk in the hope that, once the bombs stopped falling and the clouds of nuclear winter cleared, they and their brood could scamper out into whatever was left of the world and make a go of it.

But while all this preparation for the end kept everyone busy, much more insidious things than atomic war were going on – things nobody had time to think about as ICBMs sat just 90 miles off our shores.

The generation that came of age in the ‘80s never seemed to catch on to all this. They started to notice what else was going on: the rich were getting richer while the poor were getting poorer and more dangerous to each other. Even schools were becoming battlegrounds. Then came Crack, AIDS, Iran-Contra and unemployment. It was a mess, and a very real one. As Al Burian,

Bassist for the band Milemarker puts it: “What’s worse: the fear of nuclear war or the fear of there not being a nuclear war and you have to just live with things slowly getting worse?”

Chicago’s Milemarker is possibly the perfect product of the cold war era. Through its music, an amalgamation of hard-edged rock, futuristic techno beats and glumly poetic lyrics, the band conveys a message of angst and disillusionment with an increasingly disconnected world.

“Living in the United States, we live in the most evolved point of human society in a way, at least in the economic sense,” says Burian, dining on burritos a friend found in a dumpster, as he sits among broken bicycles, power tools and sawdust in the warehouse that he and his three band mates call home. Clearly, when he talks of the ills of society’s lower-middle class, he knows of what he speaks. “We’re really in the heart of the first world. This is the best it gets, and still you have vast portions of society totally depressed and despondent. I think the stuff that we have to sort of fill up our time or distract us from that – TV or drugs or whatever people use to kind of distract themselves from that essential fact – that’s sort of something that we’re trying to talk about.”
And it’s not just economics. Politics have also been fuel for Milemarker’s less-than-rosy view of life of late. Written in late 2000 and early 2001, the band’s latest release, “Anaesthetic,” was birthed in shadow of what Burian saw as a political coup.

“The bulk of it was written in the winter in Chicago in an unheated practice space,” says Burian. “The social backdrop – what I perceived going on in the world -- was that George Bush had been elected in this sketchy election where it wasn’t even clear that he had actually been popularly elected.”

Though such large political and social issues are ammunition for the band, Milemarker has plenty of its own turmoil to draw from. Besides eating trash and living in squalor, the band spends most of its time on the road. That means sleeping wherever there is space and straining relationships to the limit.

“We’re definitely a pretty apocalyptic band,” says Burian. “I think that sort of end of the world theme has been there all along. That has to do somewhat with that, interpersonally, we are always in flux. I’ve been kind of like living in closets and on floors for a couple of years now, trying to do this. It definitely puts you into a weird mindset.”

Living a nomadic life for the past 5 years has changed the members of Milemarker. For years, Burian didn’t have a bed, opting to sleep on the floor when he was not on tour so as not to get used to such luxuries – luxuries that are few and far between on the road.

“We’ve become very mission oriented,” says Burian. “It’s strange in a way because it’s just a band, but it does come to consume you. We’re enslaved by our own work ethic. You’ve got to throw yourself in. You don’t want to get soft.”

For all the positives that come from such dedication, there is a downside. Constant touring, for a lot of musicians, means more time away from doing what they love -- writing music. And those aren’t the only constraints that Burian says he feels. Even the process of recording “Anaesthetic,” he says, hampered the band’s creative process.

“In a way we were kind of just getting going when we realized we had enough stuff for a whole record,” says Burian. “In a way it is sort of frustrating because you’ve got these artificial constraints like, ‘OK, now we’ve got 45 minutes of music and so now we’re going to record it an then we’re going to go on tour for 6 months and not work on another song for that time. Who knows? Maybe the next two songs were going to be the really good ones.”

The record still came out very good – so good that it even garnered some mainstream attention, landing on the New York Time’s list of the best obscure albums of 2001. Still, Burian doesn’t put too much emphasis on the record as a sign of the band’s progression.

“I think all of our records have been sort of pivotal in the sense that we try to push ourselves as far along as we can on every one,” says Burian. “I think definitely the new record has taken us in a different direction, but I sort of feel like all of our records have.”

If the album didn’t mark a change in the bands forward movement, it did signify a milestone in how Milemarker makes music.

“All of our other records came together in sort of haphazard ways and sort of fell into place at the last minute or in the studio even,” says Burian. “The new record was a lot more consciously conceived in that it was a lot more worked out when we went into the studio.”

For the first time, Burian says, the band operated like a traditional rock band, writing songs, practicing them and then going into the studio.

“It was a lot more of four people playing music together and getting comfortable with each other,” he says. It was more of a rock record in the traditional sense. I feel like we have kind of worked backwards, almost, because our records have kind of gone from more esoteric and weird and experimental to the newest one being more like what a band would do with its first record.”

That doesn’t mean that Milemarker will now start releasing alternative rock records. In fact, it seems unclear what the future holds for the band. Over the holidays, Burian traveled to Germany where he was exposed to lots of electronic music, something that has been lurking in Milemarker’s songs all along, but which never really has come to the forefront. Burian says he came home very excited, ready to simply pack up the guitars and go totally electronic.

“I got back and Dave, the guitarist, was like, ‘well, I’m pretty much ready to totally play guitar solos and play classic rock,” says So we’re kind of like on the completely opposite end of the spectrum.”

Allowing all of the different opinions of the band’s members to flourish, Burian says, is what has kept its music fresh.

“We’re not trying to be like a specific type of band or fit into this category or that category,” says Burian. “I think a lot of times when you have something really clearly in mind, it’s easy to know based on the fact that you’re going for sounding like ‘this,’ then you should dress like ‘that,’ or you should jump around a lot or stand perfectly still. Trying to kind of consciously not fit into any one of those molds, you have to think a lot more about the way you are going to present yourself and what you are going to get across because you aren’t just tapping into people’s codes of expectation. It’s not just a matter of giving them what they want, it’s a matter of thinking about what you want and what you want to get across.”