After visiting an awesome show in the Worm in Rotterdam three days earlier, it was time to return once again to witness Harvey Milk on their first European tour, supporting Oxbow. Highly curious and with no expectations at all I ventured down to drink some Budel beer and rock out!
Harvey Milk is like a heavier version of The Melvins, only drunk. And if you don’t know who The Melvins are than stop reading and fuck off! This must also be the reason why the legend Joe Preston decided to join the band on tour, playing the rhythm guitar and doing backing vocals. I went down with no expectations because Harvey Milk is quite an unusual band that can head out in a lot of directions; their diverse sounding albums are solid proof for that. The band played three songs of their record The Pleaser which I happen to know a bit, so I knew at least some of the music played tonight. They started out with the song ‘Lay My Head Down’ from that album, which is a gentle (and gay, as vocalist/guitarist Creston Spiers informed us) song which lasts for quite some time. The tone was set for some unorthodox music after this track, and with the first eruption (which is very short) I was blown away a couple of feet. The sheer heaviness of the band astounded me, and as more tracks followed with more heavy parts in it I became very impressed by this band. How underrated can a band be?! Just listen to the track ‘Shame’, also from The Pleaser record. That shit rocks your ass like you’ve never been rocked before! I can probably write another ten pages about how amazing their show was (and just how awesome their shirts were, I got one with a bum version of E.T.!), but I’m not going to. I just want to say that you are dumb for not knowing, liking, buying, worshipping or copying the music of Harvey Milk. Music to live a life to.
Well to be honest, the best thing of this evening had finished when Harvey Milk left the stage. Up next was Oxbow, who have a nice stage gimmick; their vocalist is a huge black guy who has a reputation of getting naked and swinging his cock around on stage. I was very anxious to see this event take place, so I stayed for the entire show. And with every song I became more agitated because of the horrendous quality of this band. The music consists of some utterly boring rock stuff that I can’t even fit into a genre other than ‘wanker’ and on top of that, the guy can’t sing! All he can do is give a decent stage presentation by being huge and impressive, and undressing more and more with every song. I guess the rest of the band is scared of him (as was the audience), otherwise he would’ve been kicked out long ago. And to overrule all of my irritation up to this point, he didn’t throw out his penis! The disappointment!!! One thing is clear to me, I will stay far away from Oxbow from now on. I suggest everybody else does the same.