Customer Reviews

Life...the Best Game in Town

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Harvey Milk broke the mold for sludge in the 90s, combining equal parts feedback, empty sonic space, impossibly slow yet complex rhythms, and oppressively detuned riffs to create a couple of incredible albums and a cache of impossible to find and rabidly sought after vinyl singles.

Now their second album since reforming sees the next step in their evolution.

This album, no hyperbole, simply has it all : progressive razor sharp rhythms (Death Goes to the Winner), ascending anthemic rock with twin harmony guitar leads (Roses), off kilter pirouetting sludge (Skull Socks and Rope Shoes), and a handful of pedal to the metal jams (After All I've Done..., Maelstrom of Bad Decisions, Barn Burner, and a cover of Fear's We Destroy the Family).

Of course, they include their usual signature sludgy blues based dirges. The disarmingly mellow Motown, Decades, and the disk ending Goodbye Blues find the Milk doing what they do best - slowing it down, stretching it out, giving Creston's pained, choking wail and blistering blues leads room to fill the deep dark hole it feels you've slowly been lowered into over the course of the album.

This is an older, more finely tuned Harvey Milk - one the still bears the scars of its early years, but whose sound belies a smarter, wiser, more efficient beast.

Harvey Milk dwell outside the bubble, where the air is poisonous and thoroughly intoxicating. This record rules.

Something happens where nothing was before. It perhaps sounds like Thelonious Monk's introduction to Misterioso, and this something is the ontological rift: the birth of being. It keeps going, the universe unfolds and folds in on itself presenting a self reflexive consciousness, and awareness of being: this is the primal throes of what you do when you realize you are: you scream: your truth of being is a violent tear in the cosmic fabric of universe. The first thing you know... Uncle Jed's a millionare.