Harvey Milk
Life... The Best Game In Town

There are some bands that, once they've found a formula and a canon, bask in it and live on their laurels. Other bands, however, even though they are tied to a "genre", try to progress and say something new. This is the case with Harvey Milk (the band's name is taken from one of the most famous activists of the gay community in San Francisco, assassinated in 1978) who, with this excellent "Life... The Best Game in Town" (published by the ever-reliable HydraHead), make a mark on the doom/sludge/stoner scene by infusing their sound with a personal and "innovative" touch.

After some lineup changes, the four from Athens (yes, the city of REM and B-52's) recruit guitarist (formerly bassist for Melvins and High on Fire and sole responsible for the project Thrones) Joe Preston and deliver 10 excellent and varied songs. From the album's opening ("Death goes to The Winner"), one gets a sense of what they're dealing with: guitar and clean vocals (with Creston Spiers singing about Santa Claus and suicides, mixing Velvet Underground and Beatles references) that transform into an avalanche of feedback, guttural singing, and "heavy" percussion, ending with a terrifying piano chord that accentuates the lyrics ("woke up, get out of the bed, put a pistol on my head!").

The band's heterogeneous style is highlighted in songs like "Decades" (more linked to the sludge/stoner canon) slow and heavy, or in "Roses" (again, from an acoustic start, they throw us into a personal Melvins-style power ballad interspersed with piano and vocal inserts), in "Motown", very cadenced, and in the concluding "Good Bye Blues" where our musicians, even from the titles, remind us that the origin of their music is unmistakably black, as they offer their personal interpretation of today's blues, heavy and desperate, metallic and inescapable, drawing also from the strongly hard rock musical structures of Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd (the fast "Barn Burner", with more shouted than guttural vocals). Beyond this type of influence, the third great inspiration for Harvey Milk's sound is also noticeable: punk rock: the distorted cover of Fear (the first group of Flea) "We destroy Family" sounds in this sense, as the group revisits punk through their own paranoia and obsessiveness.

The Athens group (re-)presents themselves, therefore, with a very varied sound, although always well-anchored to the monolithic sounds typical of the genre, attempting (and succeeding in full, moreover) to introduce a certain degree of variety in their music: the feeling is that Harvey Milk has found the "happy medium", between sludge power and rock complexity, between staticity, feedback, and melodic guitar solos, offering us one of the best albums released in 2008 in this field.