05.11.10
Sonic Air Freshener & Miscellaneous Insult
This week, National Public Radio is streaming the new album from a band named Harvey Milk here.
This is hilarious on a number of levels.
Back in 2005, I reviewed an obscure Harvey Milk anthology, assembled by the extreme heavy metal label, Relapse Records.
Harvey Milk are what you get when a college-town metal trio opts for playing the altie pits over frat beer bashes. Such bands make no money and women shun them — but they do make seven-inch split singles swept up by sweaty hermits who store them in boxes where, under no circumstance, are they ever to be listened to.
More University of Georgia post-football-game orgies would have done the trick, wringing these guys of some of the Leatherface noise that attracts such fans. Flying chairs aimed at the head focus the mind on the classic riffs over underground cred every time.
“Fray-bird!” the sodden 280-pound Bulldog tackle shouts, and instead of giving in to the urge to play something from the Meat Puppets’ In a Car, by golly, you play something pentatonic and familiar.
But don’t go thinking Harvey Milk’s The Singles is an absolute loss, because the music-major guitarist saves the day. Maybe his heart just wasn’t into a complete surrender to pigfuck. Or maybe he just really liked Robert Fripp slumming on King Crimson’s Ladies of the Road.
So, once you filter out the little bit of Texas Chainsaw Massacre singer and lock onto the leaden trudge and titles, Harvey Milk are Budgie, only a little more angry and speechless. “Her Mouse Gets My Dander Up” and “I Do Not Know How to Live My Life” show a talent in the same vein as “In the Grip of a Tyrefitter’s Hand” and “She Used Me Up (and Threw Me Back Down).”
As a bonus, “Easy Thing” furnishes an arena ballad cut-to-order for people who loathe such things, and the recording closes with a friendly traditional mock of Ritchie Blackmore.
By definition, any ‘rock’ recommended to National Public Radio is sonic air freshener for an overeducated upper middle class snob demographic — not anything dangerous or exciting at all. So in five years of toil, Harvey Milk have gone from ‘pigfuck’ and hard rock to stuff for a small nationwide assortment of mostly high button sissies.
That’s progress you can measure. (Previous stuff on nerd rock and NPR here.)
Relapse Records released a great many extreme heavy metal records. I used to review some of them. And they are probably glad I don’t anymore.
Here are some of the best bits from the Voice.
On Unsane:
If success in metal were measured by the degree to which an act is the centerpiece of sadistic, forceful entertainment, Manhattan’s Unsane would be gold. Americans like the sound, look, and feel of strangers being destroyed, but how to make money on that unless you’re in the military or in penology? Unsane will always be in competition for the pennies of swine more likely to, say, want bootlegs of the U.S. Army DVD Another Day, Another Scumbag, in which “hajis” are torn apart by heavy machine-gun fire.
Past Unsane assets include one member beaten by fans until his intestines ruptured, group runs to spill gallons of butcher shop blood on blighted loading docks in the name of album art, and cruel videos of a suicide bomber blowing up the subway or skateboarders in a multitude of nausea-inducing collisions: depleted uranium, hard and stern.
These are young men so tough that if they swing at you and miss the wind gives you pneumonia. Plus they wear baseball caps made of cold-pressed tin! The first few songs on Blood Run are massive and grinding art-death. I’d tell you more about them but for two things: First, the promotional CD had some copy-control trick on it that shows the number of the songs as “54” or “99” and second, it’s time to eat my daily bag of brass knuckles and masonry chips.
On perishers Cephalic Carnage:
Lucid Interval, Cephalic Carnage’s latest, has been described as containing many “mathematical time signatures.” But this is written from the standpoint of someone who thinks counting above four quickly or stopping and starting without warning are remarkable accomplishments. It’s not a compliment you could show to your kid years from now without him laughing at you.
More accurately, the record is excrement, which — as everyone knows — does contain nutrition. But only that which sustains the kind of life most would rather not have anything to do with: e.g., the social juvie -geek equivalent of maggots and flies.
On High On Fire:
“Teabagged by God,” a secret track on High on Fire’s Blessed Black Wings, is so heavy that guitarist Matt Pike’s five tons of Laney amplification groan under its weight. “Deity’s crotch, scary crag/now you suffer the god’s teabag,” Pike mutters. He can’t sing and doesn’t shout well, either, which makes his calling out “Blessed black wings!” over
and over in the title cut cool — second only to the sound of Yahweh’s rusty iron testicles smashing around. “I am managing to stay in key a lot longer,” said the singer to one good publication about a year ago, and it shows.High on Fire don’t deliver dance beats, and their songs do not feature anthemic choruses, explains The New York Times. Nevertheless, it was reported Pike doesn’t kid around “with his long stretches of the same guitar chord.” Others as knowledgeable even claim High on Fire transcend time: You’d think the metal trio was playing at relativistic velocities — that’s nearing the speed of light — making a few minutes for them an eternity for the observer. This album’s compositions are animals, sensible in the duller parts with meaning even in their snores. And if you imagine High on Fire as many others do, they may yet pass for excellent men. [If] this seems [even] a bit exciting, disregard that stuff about teabagging and testes. It was a flight of fancy. Sorry.
And on Pig Destroyer, a grand rock band name eclipsed only by Bathtub Shitter in the department of memorable monikers:
Now will the sun on the dunghill shine. Breaking out of the pack of faddy shit metal for the small audience that needs it as a cathartic substitute for old-time dresser-top booger collections come Pig Destroyer — a drummer, an axeman, a reciter you can’t hear, no bassist. Prior to the new CD, Terrifyer, they didn’t make it on record unless good equals upgraded Anal Cunt without titles like “I’m in Anal Cunt” and “Your Band’s in the Cut-out Bin.”
Previously, Pig Destroyer were best experienced in a label promo video, taped at a dingy theater in a cinder-block Philly slum during winter. Seeing the pasty young man with a blemish on his face at the mic inspired sympathy and pity. The drummer and guitarist buried him with a shapeless noise; a company-sized group of guys, wearing baseball caps like helmets, looked on, leaden.
Backstage, the Pig Destroyer frontman frowned at his guitarist who blabbed to the camera that his bandmate was still at home with Mom. The small pleasure of being the subject of a video shoot was wrenched away and soiled by public embarrassment.