Harvey Milk - A Small Turn Of Human Kindness
Rating
RIYL
MelvinsBig Business
Conifer
Boris
Release Date
05/18/2010
Label
Hydra HeadTracklist
1. *2. I Just Want To Go Home
3. I Am Sick Of All This Too
4. I Know This Is No Place For You
5. I Alone Got Up And Left
6. I Know This Is All My Fault
7. I Did Not Call Out
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So you thought Life…The Best Game In Town had gotten away from the core of what Harvey Milk is all about, that it had lightened and softened, and pulled too far in the more commercial direction? The very thought of Harvey Milk as even remotely commercial seems laughable now, but with 2008’s Life… there were legitimate concerns amongst many fans about where these sludge merchants were headed. People, I am here to tell you that these concerns are now unfounded after the devastating, despondent megalith that is A Small Turn of Human Kindness. Sporting bass tones that sound like they were pulled from Conifer’s self-titled record and delivering gut-wrenching levels of depression that play like an ox-led plow slowly cutting through the earth, this is definitely a return to form by these veterans.
With A Small Turn of Human Kindness you’re not so much getting the seven listed tracks as much as you're getting one coherent idea subdivided. It plods along at a near glacial pace, sometimes taking the duration of an entire song for one idea to unfold. In the case of “I Am Sick Of All This Too” and “I Know This Is All My Fault,” the tracks exist to set up the payoff that is the next song. “I Am Sick” is like the pained moaning of some sort of woodland beast, and out of this primal rattle comes the first faint glimmer of aural hope in “I Know This Is No Place For You,” but the moment is fleeting, and things are quickly enveloped in gloom again. Not until the sparse “I Know This Is All My Fault” gives way to “I Did Not Call Out” will the record lighten up at all, and the irony of this is that as the song battles to a climax, the lyrics reach an anguished pitch before the entire album sinks back down into a pit of despair, ending with a down-tuned rumble that finally fades out into silence.
A Small Turn of Human Kindness is a radical reversal from Life…The Best Game In Town, which should delight doomsters everywhere. It’s a painful dirge that will drag you into the lowest pits of anguish and then rip your innards out before leaving you to die. There’s no joy, no silver lining, and no salvation; thankfully that suits Harvey Milk just fine.
--Jake Oliver
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