In 1955, photographer Robert Frank received a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to travel the country photographing the American people in all their multiplicity and uniqueness. He was unable to find an American publisher for the resulting book, The Americans, and had to have it published first in France - the reason being that his pictures portrayed an uncomfortable and anxiety-ridden America stricken with contradiction, loneliness, and fear. You might already know Frank's photos, even if you don't think you do. The first image from The Americans was used, cropped, as the cover for Infest's recent Mankind 10" reissue.
Like Robert Frank, Harvey Milk knows what it is to be unappreciated; only after their breakup did a larger interest develop in them. The band came out of Athens, GA, a city with a productive music scene that has produced a number of famous bands. Those that leap most immediately to mind are probably R.E.M. and The B-52s-but a better reference point is Neutral Milk Hotel, whose mastermind Jeff Mangum was an occasional Athens resident and the author of 1998's brilliant touchstone, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Despite the marked difference in sound, that beloved record and The Americans provide the best points of comparison for the reunited Harvey Milk's Special Wishes: all three are the product of a defiantly singular voice, and stand as unconventional documents of an aging America. The cover image of Special Wishes - a slightly blurred and slanted snapshot of a wood paneled wall featuring a poster of Jimi Hendrix - even looks like a Robert Frank photograph.
In Harvey Milk's sound, you can recognize faint specters of influence: The Melvins at their most funereal, Codeine at their most stark, Slint at their most broken-hearted and terrifying. At times, I can even hear a hint of the ragged, weary sadness of The Band at their best. But the result is something that bears as much similarity to those scattered bands as they do to each other. Harvey Milk is almost unbelievably unique, and Special Wishes is a testament written in blood, both to the power of the electric guitar and the great American art form that is rock music.
Opener "I've Got a Love" arrives like a shotgun blast to the face: all lurching, shuddering crunch and Creston Spiers' howled vocals, broken up by blasts of laser beam guitar lead. "War" and "Crush Them All" continue in this vein, offering up crushing, antimatter negation and ominous vocals armed with six scorched strings. But "Once in a While" brings the music's buried melodic character to the forefront, with the band taking up a sweetly sad trudge into oblivion as Spiers roars "I'll waive my right / to a long legal fight / I am guilty as sin / Kill me, then / everything will be alright / Once again." For the next three songs, the band continues to mix odd, churning dynamics and left-field melodies with devastating heaviness, culminating in the apocalyptic churn of "Love Swing."
It's then that Harvey Milk goes for the knockout emotional punch and catapults Special Wishes into legend. "Old Glory" is quite simply one of the most cathartic and evocative songs I've ever heard: a wash of fingerpicked guitar frames Spiers' sturdy, Scott Walker-esque baritone as it delivers a genuinely incendiary, imagistic lyric, with an under-girding of electric guitar that gathers momentum into a roaring, gut-wrenching anthem. There's nothing else like this in music today; there are very few bands with the ambition, talent, or guts to play a song like this. As if that wasn't enough, the possibly even more ballsy closer "Mother's Day" offers eight and a half minutes of soaring, gorgeous melodies, creating a heart-wrenching emotional crescendo: beginning with an arrangement of sighing, mournful violins and organ, the song gives way to Spiers' towering lead guitar, which is beamed in like pure white light through a sea of distortion as the last notes echo out into infinity.
I could go on and on about this record. The recording is flawless, the aesthetic design perfect. Rhythm section Steven Tanner and Paul Trudeau provide a sturdy, savagely physical foundation on which Spiers is able to construct his heart-rending art; his vocals are remarkably dynamic and evocative, and his guitar playingââ¬Â¦Jesus. Special Wishes could be one of the purest and most powerful guitar records ever recorded: there are chords on this album that will bring your house down around you, and there are melodies that will leave you crying your goddamn eyes out. Few records carry this level of weight (both instrumental and emotional).
Contrary to some other members of the Scene Point Blank staff, I don't think 2006 has produced a huge number of great records. There have been a great many good ones, but only a handful of genuine classics. That said, Special Wishes is about as bludgeoningly powerful as American rock music gets: Harvey Milk makes no concessions and offers no apologies, instead following their muse into realms of catharsis, vision and intensity rarely seen.
