On its first two albums, 1994's My Love Is
Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be and 1995's Courtesy
And Good Will Toward Men, Athens, Georgia's Harvey Milk cultivated a strain of
dirge-metal that was so outrageously glacial and depressed, it made Swans and
Melvins sound twee in comparison. Bizarrely, the band followed these albums
with an unironic (and awesome) set of KISS- and Led Zeppelin-inspired boogie
rock—1998's The Pleaser—before going on hiatus, but with 2006's Special
Wishes,
Harvey Milk returned with its boogie and brawn in balance. Life… The Best
Game In Town
continues this idea, with the band (now featuring Thrones' Joe Preston on second guitar)
alternately crushing skulls, moving asses, and in tracks like the
Zeppelin-on-Quaaludes standout "Decades," doing both at once. Even subjectively
speaking, Life… isn't
easy listening (the anvil-heavy ballad "Roses" alone could drive the clinically
depressed to suicide), but the improved contrast between upbeat and harrowing
makes Harvey Milk's extremes that much easier to appreciate.