WHATEVER WEDNESDAY: Harvey Milk

Well boy howdy, its time for me to post a thing. The trouble is, I have no idea what I should write. I'm not really a blogger, you know. I guess I am now though. Most of the other bros here are into the whole review thing, and that's super cool. I'm not really all about that though. There are a million other dudes you can check out on the blogopshere (brooo) who can review the new Bon Iver or Animal Collective or whatever the fuck way better than I can. I did that correctly, right? You bold the artist names? Cool. That's not to say I'm not going to be talking about music, I don't really have much else to talk about. Just don't really expect the newest greatest thing here. Don't expect anything at all, really. If you've even made it this far into this drivel I commend you. So I'm really just going to be using this space to talk about whatever. It's my goddamned blog, I'll post what I want. It'll probably just be me picking an album or artist at random, or maybe just whatever I happen to be listening to when I get to writing this crap. By and large, just ignore this column and go back to reading the actual content found on this blog. All the other dudes are way better at this than I am. Whatever.

Alright, lets do the damn dance. Let's talk about one of my favorite bands ever. Lets talk about goddamned Harvey Milk. I'm not really going to get too far into biographies, I'm not writing a book report. But yeah, this band is three dudes from Georgia I think who have been playing together since the early nineties.

There's Creston on the left, the singer and guitarist, who looks just like he sounds. There's uhhh Stephen on the right, the bassist, who has a cool restaurant in Brooklyn I think. And then there's Kyle, the drummer, who looks like he should probably be filling in on tours for The Appleseed Cast or something, but don't let that scare you. He's just as terrifying as the other dudes. Also the Appleseed Cast is goddamned great, listen to them. Harvey Milk also did an album or two maybe with Joe Preston who played with SunnO))) and The Melvins and stuff. Apparently he was a dick though, I guess. I don't know. This is all conjecture. Speaking of The Melvins, Harvey milk draws a pretty close comparison with those dudes. They're the band that sounds the closest to Harvey Milk anyways, but it's still a pretty loose fit. So what does Harvey Milk sound like? Genres don't really do them justice. The best way to describe them, that I've found, is such: Find the most miserable, broken, used-up homeless man there is. Get him drunk, I mean despicably drunk. Once he's good and blubbering, force a guitar into his hands (that he doesn't know how to play) and turn the gain so far up that all that comes out is pain. Have him cover all the Leonard Cohen songs he knows from memory. Right before he starts playing, though, ask him what it was like to lose everyone and everything he has ever loved. That's kinda what Harvey Milk sounds like. Shitty metaphors aside, they do some pretty different things depending on what album you're listening to, but there is always the same theme to their sound. They've got this wailing, bottom-of-the-bottle groan. Its kinda sludge some times, kinda grungy, sorta bluesy, and completely fucking radical. There is such a palpable sense of pain and heartache, but at the same time they're laughing about it. Their early albums, most notably Courtesy and Goodwill Toward Men, are largely experimental. Aggressive drone mixed with blasts of balls-out sludge, interspersed with mild-mannered acoustic passages that are completely jarring in contrast. A few years after they made that album they broke up for a little while. When they came back, almost ten years later, their style was notably different. They had a more bluesy approach to their typically noisy sludge rock. A bit of a twangy jangle, you know. Less into making completely obnoxious music to be assholes, more into rocking the fuck out and being assholes. The new direction wasn't so well received though, most of their fanboys and the critics and whoever just wanted another Courtesy, so Harvey Milk recorded an album in 2010 called A Small Turn of Human Kindness in response. What we got was a massive fuck-you. A half hour of feedback and torturous wailing while Creston moans indecipherably about being tired or something. It's fantastic. Seeing these dudes live is a level beyond their studio work as well. The looks on their faces, the smells, the energy they expel is inspiring and depressing at the same time. Watching Creston writhe and howl on the ground while steve and kyle soldier on is a thing you don't want to miss. These guys do in earnest what most people do because it looks cool. Smashed guitars, broken cymbals, the whole nine yards. They have a solo on one of their songs that involves a sledge hammer and a metal pipe. Don't miss it. Buy them whiskey too, they really appreciate it. So basically what I'm trying to say with all of that is that Harvey Milk is worth your time. You might hate it, you may hiss and spit and rip out your earbuds in disgust, but know that these dudes are doing something that nobody else could ever do. There is something so awful and so honest and raw about Harvey Milk's music that is such a rare thing to find anywhere else. What I've said doesn't even begin to do this band the justice they deserve. I'll probably write about them a hundred more times and it won't even scratch the surface. If you're looking for a place to start with them, they actually reviewed their own discography right over here, its a great read. Just listen to them.

-Nick Weber