A Small Turn of Human Kindness

Georgia's Harvey Milk may be wickedly brilliant, tectonically huge, and caustically hilarious, but they don't seem all that happy about any of it. Still their ever-present grimace has never felt quite as fixed as it does on their latest, A Small Turn of Human Kindness. Many longtime fans found 2008's Life... The Best Game in Town, which played at times like a sampler of Milk's many past successes, neither weird nor challenging enough, and Small Turn is a sharp shift towards the slow, somber, and fucking bleak. These are moods they've explored plenty in the past, but never with such a single-minded dedication to the downcast.

For an album as bold as 2008’s masterful Life…The Only Game in Town was, what was conspicuously absent from that record was the ugliness that Harvey Milk had excelled at capturing in previous years. Sure, Life had more than its share of bleak moods, but the band’s focus was more on toying with conventional songwriting, the album loaded with pop culture references and juxtaposing accessible melodies with their usual bruising brand of sludge/doom metal. Although it was not meant to be specifically a “crossover” record, its broad-ranging sounds did draw in listeners from the indie rock side of the fence along with underground sludge fans, and that alone would be cause for alarm among the more insular listeners who had been into Harvey Milk for the last dozen years. Consequently, in the eyes of many it was imperative that the band return and make a statement on their seventh album, to show they could pull off that unsettling quality once again. And in a move that will thrill longtime fans and befuddle newer audiences, Harvey Milk has done just that.

'Progression' is a bit of a weasel word when it comes to discussing the career arc of Harvey Milk. They first came into existence 18 years ago, spending eight of those years (1998 to 2006) disbanded, and in that time have released seven studio albums. Although said albums have demonstrated the Georgian sludge metal ensemble's eclecticism and genre-based gazumping of expectations, it's hard to mull over Harvey Milk's catalogue and conclude that they have matured or evolved or, yes, progressed in any obvious and linear way. Perhaps this is why A Small Turn Of Human Kindness, their seventh album, takes its title from a track on their first full-length release albeit second recorded, My Love Is Higher Than What Your Assessment Of My Love Could Be from 1994. It's not that they are Ramonic in their monomania, by any means, but there could be a message imparted that despite becoming a critically approved and presumably not wildly unprofitable band now, they are in essence the same band as the sarky early-Nineties youngsters from the Athens rock scene.