Album Review: Harvey Milk, "Special Wishes"

“How do you think old glory feels/displayed over battlefields/after so long folded away?” asks Harvey Milk front man and mastermind Creston Spiers in the opening lines of “Silly and Small,” one of his new album’s flagship songs. A reference to “old glory” in Special Wishes, being the first new Harvey Milk album in eight years, might as well be aimed at the Athens, Ga three-piece itself as it is our red, white, and blue. Andee Connors of Tumult records, who re-issued Harvey Milk’s limited-production second album Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men on CD in 2000, once said that Harvey Milk was “too heavy to be post-rock; too weird to be metal; too everything to be anything.” Indeed, on Special Wishes the band displays ripping classic rock-style guitar leads (“Once in a While”), gentle acoustic passages (“Silly and Small”), suffocating time-changes amid tar-pit fumed slow-and-low heaviness (“War”), epic chord progressions evoking the end credits of some apocalyptic space-war film (“Mother’s Day”), and throat-ripping bluesy vocals (“Love Swing”), then juggles them all like flaming chainsaws. The band has always drawn comparisons to The Melvins (whom they openly revere), and this is unlikely to change with Special Wishes, but there also remains an especially off-kilter, gut-wrenching quality that they have always had which propels them far beyond the status of mere hero-worshippers.

Harvey Milk have never been ahead of their time or behind the times; they have always operated strictly by their own calendar, which has lead the small number of die-hards that they’ve attracted in their fourteen years to frequently bemoan their “criminally overlooked” status. With this new album, an opening slot for The Melvins back on October 28th at the 40 Watt, and another re-issues of Courtesy… via metal juggernaut Relapse Records just a couple of months ago, the band might be about to receive some of that credit past-due. However, Harvey Milk are as beautiful and profound as they are because they have always been more concerned with making music as a manner of breathing than as a manner of achieving externally delivered hallmarks. With Special Wishes, this old glory makes it clear that they never really left the battlefield, and that no matter who does or doesn’t want to write their name in the sky, they will remain amid the mud and the blood below, smashing perceptions of what rock music is and should be from the skulls of anyone within hammer strike.

—Jace Bartet