The edge is gone folks, but more so, the heart, the soul, and the authenticity of a real…read moreunderground scene. Now the life of the party is lost like a chicken McNugget dropped in the ball pit of a McDonald's play place. What's left is a random collection of half-baked ideas by management with no understanding of a music scene whose ever-changing themes seem copied from the websites of clubs in Europe, or maybe, Alabama, who knows? Go upstairs and things are worse with a Janky wanna-be suburban gangsta DJ playing pre-recorded mixes from songs that were obviously ripped from YouTube, and shooting monopoly money from toy guns like an anamatronic rat at Chick E. Cheezy's.
Anything that was truly edgy and cool has now been thrown out and replaced by pure neglect, promos slapped together by some AI they didn't even bother buying a subscription to--you know, the basic version which is completely on brand--reduced to a desperate cash grab. This is apparent as soon as you step over puddles of urine and walk in the door, and through the fake metal detector (and oh yeah, then over sand bags and puddles from sewer pipes that overflow because the owner is too cheap to invest in repairs or ensure customer safety), finally into a building that is in disrepair. Yeah, it's a vibe from a backwater dancehall in Khazakhstan but unintentionally, not so much as a place of entertainment.
Almost everything, and I mean everything in the venue is old, outdated, or broken, from the ATM (you'd be crazy to trust that anyway) and arcade games, to the club rooms with broken, non-working club lights, and again pipes that drip and leak (you'll literally see buckets on the middle of the dance floor, and garbage bags draped over the DJ booths and the bar--and no, they don't sanitize after these accidents, evveeeer. The place is in disrepair and what used to be rooms with cool decor are now just generic and dirty looking as basic cleanliness is non-existent--the whole venue reeks the moment you walk in. Most worrisome is the lack of security (good luck finding anyone if you need help after you get past the door person) making the disorganized chaos feel unsafe and gross and anything but exciting. While Milk was once a cool and celebrated part of the Denver club scene up until a few years before the pandemic, the owner has obviously lost touch with reality and has no sense of loyalty to a clientele and commujity who made his clubs successful. But this has been a long time coming as Milk has been on the slow and steady decline for years. Over the last year the place has spiraled into a complete free fall with the last regular DJs pushed out and replaced by amateurs like the dude who needs a platform to stand on whose sets sound like a complication of greatest hits CDs played on random, with no theme or identity. The events and nights seem thrown together at the last minute, like you know splattered against the wall to see what will stick, but it's stinking instead. Its consistency, its soul, its relevance is gone. Most damning and reflective is the point several other reviewers have made about the vibe of sexism that exudes like the toxic masculinity that produces it from those who run this place as it's almost all male managers, DJs and bartenders, with a few women in the lowest, menial positions. And that obvious bias and grossness speaks volumes!
My humble advice: save your night, your money, your self-respect and conscience choosing instead to support venues and spaces that actually know something about loyalty and principles other than greed and pettiness, which actually cares about and respects its patrons and customers.
