Review - Harvey Milk - Life.The Best Game In Town

Harvey Milk - Life.The Best Game In Town

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7 out of 10

The memory of Harvey Milk (The man) has been kept alive in many ways; various public buildings around the United States, a place in Time magazine's list of 'the most important 100 people of the 20th century' and this year, a bust in San Francisco's city hall. To that list we must also add a band from Athens, Georgia - the city that has given us REM, the B52s and DJ Danger Mouse. A broad spread of music and Harvey Milk sound nothing like any of them, you may be glad to hear. In existence since 1992 and on hiatus between 1998 and 2006, Life.The Best Game in Town is their sixth album.

The band's own PR calls them 'gruelling', so no-one is under any illusions here. Life. dangles notions of 'easy listening' over a shining, glutinous pit of Hell. There are moments of relief (Notably the Tortoise-meets-the-Beach Boys beginning of Death Goes to the Winner and the frighteningly fragile start to Roses), but mostly it's the kind of full-on raging slab of Melvins doom that makes old men worry about their hearing and return to their Black Sabbath albums for a bit of peace. The production is excellent - neither a woefully thin attempt to capture the band's evident live fury or a bass-heavy fuzzed-out piece of ear destruction. Thankfully, Adolf Coors and Mayor McCheese have kept the fuzz sharp and the bass tight, resulting in no dilution of power whatsoever.

High points are the aforementioned first track, a nigh-on eight-minute statement of intent ('write about why your [sic] glad to be alive you asshole') ending in the lengthy feedback torture of a guitar being played with a brick, before vocalist Creston Spiers croaks out 'woke up, got out of bed, put a pistol to my head' and the whole ends with the E-chord crash from A Day In The Life. And that's just track one, remember. After All I've Done For You. crunches all-comers with an axe-sharp chugging main riff. We Destroy the Family is an ironclad punk thrashout recalling Primus, only with more violence. Motown is a shuffling '70s zombie, the MC5 on Mogadon. A Maelstrom of Bad Decisions is Rammstein on crack. Goodbye Blues is the sound of a black flag being waved over Son House, Charlie Patton et al being churned through a car crusher, with lead guitar like a filthy laser beam. The whole ends with an insane take on the 'that's all folks' cartoon theme, as if the band know listeners are going to walk away wondering what the hell they've just subjected their brains to. And they're probably right.

Listen: www.myspace.com/harveymilk

Tracklist:
1. Death Goes To The Winner
2. Decades
3. After All I've Done For You, This Is How You Repay Me?
4. Skull socks & Rope Shoes
5. We Destroy the Family
6. Motown
7. A Maelstrom of Bad Decisions
8. Roses
9. Barn Burner
10. Goodbye Blues