Harvey Milk – S/T (2010) [Hydra Head] // Grade: A

I’ve only seen Harvey Milk live in concert once. It was during All Tomorrow’s Parties in Minehead, England in May of 2009.  They sucked. Granted this was back to back to back to back with Sleep, Electric Wizard, the Jesus Lizard, and Devo and shit so the caliber of rockin’ was pretty fucking high. But Harvey Milk totally let me down that one gig. I’d been listening to a lot of My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be at the time and that album was blowing my fucking mind, but for that one hour or so they were on stage all I could think was “What the fuck? Who put this Skynrd 45 on 33? Bogus.”

This album, has not a fucking thing in common with that live performance.  Apparently, this album was meant to be their debut, recorded in ’94 and pieced together from old bootleg copies, this shit will blow your weak fucking mind out of your gaping, newly bored out eardrums. If you’re familiar with Harvey Milk’s catalog, think My Love… ‘cept way more sludgy rock. Frankly it’s just evil, menacing, grinding, plodding shit that you can’t help but nod along to. Creston Spiers sounds like he’s either being strangled or strangling someone the entire album. I heard someone describe them as “Swans covering the Melvins… or maybe the Melvins covering Swans…?” once. That is way fucking accurate in this case.  The songs are long, evil, and constantly shifting.

The Production is significantly thinner than their later albums, you know, prolly cause it was pieced together from cassette tapes and shit. For some reason, where most thin production on doom stuff comes across as shitty and unbefitting of the music, it really adds a great punkish vibe to a pretty metal album. This shit is definitely on my repeat listening list for many moons to come.

Also, go see Harvey Milk live. I’ll bet they’re way fucking better next time.