Harvey Milk The Bob Weston Sessions

A certain mythology seems to surround cult bands like Harvey Milk. When they recorded their self-titled album in ‘93 or ‘94 with Bob Weston, they intended it to be their debut, but the record was shelved only to be later re-mastered and released in Jan. 2010. The album features the original lineup: vocalist/guitarist Creston Spiers, bassist Stephen Tanner, and drummer Paul Trudeau, who eventually left the ensemble. Ever since its official first LP My Love is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, the band could have functioned as the missing link between Black Sabbath, the Melvins, and Sunn O))), culminating in 2008 with the release of Life… The Best Game in Town. They’ve made some of the most demoralizing music of the last twenty years, out-despairing Leonard Cohen on his own song, One of Us Cannot be Wrong, and miring themselves deeper and deeper into their tar pit of detuned guitars. In many ways, their self-titled disc, also known as The Bob Weston Sessions, is their Lost Ark.

 

The album presents Harvey Milk at its most metallic. On Plastic Eggs – which appeared later on Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men – the band employs a tritone motif that vaguely recalls the Mars movement from Gustav Holst’s suite The Planets. There’s some premonition of drone metal, though the blues-based licks that close out the song are about as close to Sabbath as they get.

 

My Father’s Life awakens quietly with Spiers groaning as if dying of old age. The signature growl commences soon enough, though, as the sustained guitar drones test the amplifiers’ ability to handle the required volume. The tone shakes and shimmers with distortion and we can hear the amps struggle to hold on. With the rough production, it’s mostly impossible to decipher Spiers’s words, but the song’s genius is that we learn almost everything we need to know from the instruments alone. It ends with a peaceful major triad, possibly signifying the serenity of death.

 

Though more famous for their glacial compositions, Harvey Milk could play almost as fast as the best thrash band, with unpredictable transitions into half-time, triplet-filled sections. This they prove on Merlin is Magic, which they released on My Love…. Probolkoc and Smile (a recording from a live show) also burn rubber, displaying tempos fast enough to suggest Black Flag and enough atonality to point to The Jesus Lizard’s noise rock. Harvey Milk was and still is one of the most versatile bands out there, and one need only to analyze Jim’s Polish to make that case. The band flows between time changes with as much grace as any studio-lacquered experimental group like Mew or Sigur Rós.

 

Though Harvey Milk has recorded some of the most depressing music of even its own genre, there is some release from the dread. The drone-silence-drone mechanics of F.S.T.P presage what the band perfected with later efforts like Pinocchio’s Example, but the sounds of chimes and ringing guitar tones shine through the bleakness. For a change, Anthem is positively joyful in its ferocity. The guitar licks are jubilant Jimmy Page tributes, foreshadowing the left turn they took into blues-metal with Pleaser.    

 

The sessions are essential listening for fans of the band or anyone interested in the depth of sludge rock’s brutality. The group has never been accessible, but this record, as unpolished as it is, provides as good of an entry point as any, though Courtesy… and others are superior records. In fact, as a window into their career, The Bob Weston Sessions reveal how sparingly the band has since applied anything that could be called a “sheen.” Many listeners, even those willing to experiment with sludge metal, may open this Ark with hesitation, and that’s certainly for the best. Some heads may explode.