Harvey Milk

Emerging as a stark outlier from the college and indie rock milieu that defined Athens, Georgia, the cult band Harvey Milk produced some of the most deliberate, crushing, and unyielding music of the late 1990s. Formed as a trio in the early part of that decade, the group consisted of Creston Spiers on guitar and vocals, Stephen Tanner on bass, and Paul Trudeau on drums. Their debut full-length, My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, appeared in 1996 on the small Yesha imprint based in North Carolina. The next year brought their defining statement, Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men, an album of anguished intensity and extreme tempos that Reproductive Records first pressed in a limited double-vinyl edition before tUMULt issued it on CD in 2000. After that release Trudeau departed; Kyle Spence stepped in on drums, steering the band toward a more direct classic-rock approach shaped above all by ZZ Top along with AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. The minimal notes accompanying Courtesy even declared without irony that “ZZ Top is the best.” Reproductive documented this new direction on the 1998 album The Pleaser, after which Harvey Milk dissolved. The members reconvened in 2005, issuing Special Wishes the following year on Troubleman Unlimited, the same label that also reissued Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men. Relapse later handled reissues of My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be and The Pleaser. Hydrahead signed the band and released Life...The Best Game in Town in June 2008. In 2010 Hydrahead brought out the previously unreleased self-titled album that Harvey Milk had recorded with Bob Weston in 1994 and that had circulated only as a very limited vinyl pressing. Following tours supporting Torche and Coalesce later that year, the group delivered its seventh studio album, A Small Turn of Human Kindness.