Easy Listening: Harvey Milk, "A Small Turn of Human Kindness"
by Brad Nelson
Harvey Milk, an Athens, Ga. doom metal band, release their seventh album, A Small Turn of Human Kindness, this week. The doom metal palette is generally somewhat monochromatic-it is usually two-to-five people approximating Black Sabbath and Blue Cheer in slow motion. These bands make the noise of the ancients if the ancients were truckers with bags of glue. And hey, maybe they were?
Where Harvey Milk differ is in white space. They litter silence the length of canyons in their thick and severe music. The lulls arrive like sudden dips in the heart monitor. It would seem a reprieve from the actual songs, which are overrun with tones that resound in the body like trauma.
Instead, it is completely horrifying. It is the moment when you realize the monster is entirely real because it can breathe.
Harvey Milk are often mentioned in tandem with the Melvins, their colleagues in doom. Former Melvins bassist Joe Preston has, on separate occasions, recorded the band and performed with them. They are also like the Melvins in that their form of abuse is as much a source of laughter as it is the source of our shaking. Which is awfully considerate of them. We all need to take refuge in comedy.
The new record swells, distends, mimics the slow rending of earth. It is desolate and spare. In this way, it deliberately recalls their second record, Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men. I refuse to discuss Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men. It knows what I look like when I am naked.
It also refers to their 2006 release, Special Wishes, in which their typical drawn gait met the stylistic turn of 1997’s The Pleaser, which is an AC/DC record about hemorrhaging. The moments where twin guitar lines and escalating melody invade Kindness-that is Special Wishes making itself known, twisting its ludicrous body so that we may retrieve some pleasure from the otherwise bleak cavity.
I will now discuss Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men. I first heard it in 2006. Thinking of it now, I feel the old fear stirring. It unfolds slow, as trees drawn upward by the sky. It is as influenced by modern classical as it is by noise and death.
Their first record, My Love is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, quotes Gustav Holst’s “Jupiter” amid the tumult of “The Anvil Will Fall”….
….but this is in the service of high comedy. Courtesy wants for more. Courtesy wants to carve the whole face of Jesus out of bonemeal. Harvey Milk resolve to cover Leonard Cohen when it is necessary.
They also subvert their own engagement thereof. In an interview with Self-Titled, Harvey Milk detail the conceptual heft of Kindness:
This was made for all the people that think Courtesy is our best album. We came up with the most pretentious music we possibly could, and since that wasn’t enough, we wrote ridiculous words about total bullshit and named the songs in the most annoying fashion we could imagine. But we thought we could keep pushing the envelope; we named the album the same thing as a song on another album of ours (My Love Is Higher…) and then designed an album cover that truly shows you how much we care-it’s a picture of some trees. We have reached the point of complete and total creative bankruptcy, but at least we made it shorter than the last record, so you can get through listening to it and return it to the store for a refund faster.
Whether the band’s active malice toward their every release (sans Special Wishes) is feigned or real, they regard their work with no self-seriousness, which makes my attitude, how I receive them like compound fractures, ridiculous. I am impacted by jokes and filler.
Whatever. Jokes and filler can be transformed through overzealous perspective. Whatever the technical detail of their assembly, Courtesy and Kindness bears an enormous center of gravity.
If you would like to hear it, A Small Turn of Human Kindness is streaming at NPR, where I understand they are producing the new fantastic naive children of oblivion who will know the plight of Mexican crops but will not be able to look each other in the eye.
Harvey Milk will laugh at Brad Nelson and then devour him.