Harvey Milk’s set at Canadian Music Week was one of the most challenging and assumption-breaking shows I’ve seen in quite a while. Existing in a space between an increasingly distant past and a forthcoming dystopic future, their sound was filled with unashamed references to classic rock and swampy blues, drowned in menacingly brutal doom textures.
They began with 20 minutes of meandering sludge, built upon precisely placed yet sporadic drum flourishes in no discernable time signature. Grumbling bass syncopations developed in symbiosis with hesitant albeit thunderous drumming, creating an ominous soundscape rather than a driving beat. Creston Spiers emitted shearing squalls of guitar noise that acted as lightening strikes ripping though the foreboding tempest of brooding rhythm.
Following the epic opener, Harvey Milk reached into their back-catalogue, which lies outside the traditional metal and hardcore canons, to breathe new life into standard rock tropes, before agonizingly snuffing them out. Like a sociopath exhuming the decaying corpse of the 20th century rock, delta-blues riffs oozed from the songs’ disemboweled intestines and spurts of chugging ZZ-Top progressions spewed like blood from its mangled remains. Memphis boogie and honky-rock became the festering stew from which their maggot-y sound was born.
The combination of Spiers’ seamlessly effortless channeling and dismantling of the southern music tradition, Kyle Spense’s haunting drumming, and Stephen Tanner’s roaring bass provided an ahistorical lesson in American popular music. Bringing forth the future by mutilating the past. There was no irony; there was no nostalgia. There is only Harvey Milk.