Life … The Best Game In Town starts as if it’s going to be some twee post-rock indie thing, complete with clean plucked strings and creepy harmonised voices a la psychedelic-era Pink Floyd, but just as you’ve started to wonder why they bothered featuring an old Maiden poster on the album sleeve, Harvey Milk erupt into a a grumpy bulldozer of a chorus, and everything is right with the world as “Death Goes To The Winner” evolves into a satisfyingly lengthy chugging dirge.
Did I just use the term dirge in a positive way? I surely did, sir – Harvey Milk make slothful detuned sludge sound just fine to my ears, reshaping the bluesy format of Southern metal and stoner rock into something that glories in its own deceptively lumpen simplicity. Rest assured: Life … The Best Game In Town presses all the buttons for the doom patrol – ludicrously hard-hitting rhythms knocked out with a steady and relentless pace, huge riffs smeared out across the space of four bars where a normal band would only use one, mangled pentatonic fretboard escapades and vocals like the baffled bellowing of a partially-tranquillised Hell’s Angel.
Harvey Milk’s proficiency should come as no great surprise, as they delivered three full (if little-known) albums of material back in the mid-nineties before reforming for 2006’s Special Wishes; that legacy leaves them with the strength of a style that is distinctly their own. Life … The Best Game In Town has a core of sludge and noise, but the power is shaped by eclectic influences and a willingness to experiment – not to mention being bolstered by the bass skills of the near-legendary Joe Preston.
The end result being that what at first glance may appear to be uncomplicated blatter reveals great technical proficiency and inventive songcraft. The broken-levee breakbeat that heralds “Decades” is pure John Bonham homage; “Roses” reprises the psychedelic weirdness of the album’s start before leaping into a soaring epic harmonised lead hook at its pivot point; “Barn Burner” rages with lo-fi speed metal skankiness, and the second section of “After All I’ve Done For You, This Is How You Repay Me?” suggests what the Imperial March might have sounded like, had Darth Vader composed it in the midst of a marathon heroin binge.
What is truly hard to communicate in words is the sense of fun that runs all through Life … The Best Game In Town. Harvey Milk share in the dead-pan aesthetic of The Melvins, making music that could easily be mistaken for po-faced gloom and misanthropy, but they scatter moments of gleeful humour throughout. Just in case you were in any doubt, album closer “Goodbye Blues” goes out with its fists in the air - ragged, vast and defiant like some post-apocalyptic pit-fight champion - before being ushered away on the coat-tails of the Loony Toons signature theme.
Harvey Milk make thinking man’s sludge, and Life … The Best Game In Town has more than enough detail to keep you coming back for glass after glass. A fine vintage blend for the noise connoisseur.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: doom, Harvey Milk, Life ... The Best Game In Town, noise, sludge, Southern metal, stoner
