Harvey Milk - "A Small Turn of Human Kindness"

Harvey Milk

"A Small Turn of Human Kindness"

(2010)

Hydra Head

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.

Small Turn airs its grievances to the tune of near-funereal doom metal; tempos crawl, chords hang in the air like stink, riffs unfurl over many minutes, and frontman Creston Spiers' yowl reaches untold heights of lowness. This sort of grimy dirge-metal isn't new to the Milk lexicon but before, there was at least a glint of levity to offset the withering stare. Nothing about Small Turn suggests anyone is kidding around.

The album is nothing if not deliberate; its musical arc, from the listless ebb of its first third to the more dynamic midsection through to the stirring, hard-fought climax of its last couple of tracks, feels as unified as the record's bearish, behemoth sound. Valleys abound, but there are few peaks. Indeed, this monochromatic record can seem like 45 cheerless minutes all in a row, but the meticulous structure starts to show itself after a few listens, and its most decrepit bits verging on thrilling once you're familiar with them. The album's most electrifying segment comes at the end of half an hour of clamber, when a delicate piano line replaces the bleary guitars and Spiers' voice finally drops from a bellow to a whisper before letting the growl go yet again. For as unshowy and willfully acrimonious as Small Turn gets, there is a level of mastery here that is easy to respect even when it's a little hard to love.

Small Turn's greatest strength is also its primary flaw; they do this particular sort of downtrodden as well as anybody, but given all they're capable of, it's a shame that they limit themselves to such a small sonic palette. Still, it's yet another curiously strong record from one of today's most interesting bands, a worthy successor to their downtrodden pre-hiatus LPs, and one hell of a buzzkill. -P.T.

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