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Harvey Milk - Life...The Best Game in Town

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 July 1 2008 at 05:34:15 AM



Not another Harvey Milk review. Well, at least not your runathamill Milk rev, where stuff like “tectonic plates” and “volcanic scree” is taken up as often as the drummer as “sledge wielding” stormtrooper, “pummeling” metariddims inta place with arms no smaller than Redwood trunks. Oh shut the fuck up please. We weren’t thinking about a thing remotely within that one-sheet locus so many years ago: We’d gone through the Blanton’s, the beers, a package of cheap cigars. One eye opened to the rolling road and ZZ Top’s Rio Grande Mud warbling out of the hi-fi’s crackly last legs. Cold as it gets here in Hotlanta. Barely feel the fingers. Wearing layers. Sitting stiff. A pair of drunken concrete scarecrows. Copper kept playing “Just Got Paid” over and over again. Rolled into the parking lot and it’s unlit, full of cars. People fogging out, killing King Cobra quarts. What transpired in those next few minutes took actual hours. Dog year, week, day, hour, minute type shit. Guy leans into the window, asks for spare change. A knife flashed; the heart rate roars. Copper hits the gas and slams hard on the brakes and the guy’s left just totally surprised standing there with the knife. And then he starts going apeshit.

I’m gone cut y’all muthafuckas. Gimmie allyo gawdamn money.

He just kept saying that shit. Us? Ineffable fear, the numbing absurd, etc. But then it wasn’t scary. It was actually fucking funny. We walked off towards Dottie’s and left the guy standing there, brandishing the knife. Copper told him he was gonna get even drunker and come back out after the show, find him, and kick him to sleep. Yeah, Harvey Milk was always a favorite of mine. But from then on, though, they became “important.” A band I’d almost fucking DIED going to see. Getting jacked by some crackhead for a twenty and a dugout. It was not to be. Something about grace might work here. Maybe not. What followed wasn’t so existential. Or theological. In tha least: Nth Mickey’s Big Mouth. Well whiskey. Ugh. A paper plate of soggy fries. A blunt in the bathroom. Ashing into the big wall urinal, a dead squirrel propped up in its basin. Legs crossed, a snide deth smile upon his face. Tiny vermin hands clutched a brown paper towel: IT’S COLD GIN TIIIIIIIIIIME AGAIN! written in black Sharpie. Creston was in one of those boiler suits and he was fucking swimming in sweat. They sounded way different. More like amp’d up ZZ Top than the initial twisted sludge rock Bantha they rode sinking into the sand. Drummer twirled his sticks. Smoked whilst shredding. Tanner: tha baritone boogie. A street hustler in sweat-stained Braves hat and Iron Maiden tee. I smiled so much through that set my face hurt for five days.

The Milk doesn’t really sound any different from how they did that cold night nth years ago. Their new record doesn’t really sound that different either. The opener, “Death Goes to the Winner,” is The Milk in nuce. Hushed to howling vox; a drummer on the gittar riddim; disregard for appropriate, bullshit structure and a willingness to provoke in order to arrive at a motherfuckin’ heh-vee metamusical “statement” stated in startlingly disparate ways. The Milk liked to sweeten the wager. Who gone blink? Buzzo? Naw. Maybe he would. But maybe Creston could hold that ascending riff for a little longer? Probably. The Milk sure could make it dumber. Quote some Beatles lyrics and pound the piano. Follow that up with a big ol’ Bonzo beat. Boring. Limpen Livervurst gittar line. Schmaltz singsong. But then they could turn right around and level you with something like the spectacularly entitled, “After All I’ve Done for You, This is How You Repay Me?” Oh Man. Or “A Maelstrom of Bad Decisions.” That’s it. Tony Williams Lifetime woulda/shoulda had some trouble charting up those calisthenics. Christ. Shit wiggles and jiggles and then just spreads out in this shit-stained boxers of a riff. Craggly, cranky—odiferous presence not unlike the AARP community sofa after taco night. There’s some other good to great stuff: “We Destroy the Family,” which drowns Dusty Hill in the Lone Star storm. No real clunkers. “So while this might not be their best effort,” itsa billion times better than Boris—and hotter, too. Which is to say its “classic Harvey Milk.” Plus, they’re, like, my fuckin’ talisman. How could this be anything other than great?

[Stewart Voegtlin]

Harvey Milk
Life… The Best Game in Town
Hydrahead Records
2008
www.myspace.com/harveymilk
type: reviews    keywords: harvey milk, hotlanta, crackheads, king cobra, lhp016,   

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