Road trips to see bands are an integral part of music culture. Musicians cannot play every city to every handful of fans that may (or may not) show up, so these excursions are pretty common to folk with more than a passive interest in music. In 2010 some friends and I decided we needed to make the 3 hour drive to catch #harveymilk , coalesce and the atlas moth. On that trip we discovered that Pittsburgh is a rough town. Upon arriving to the neighborhood of the venue we found a pizzeria/pub for some food and witnessed a vicious fistfight which spilled onto the street outside. It was a morbidly fascinating spectacle and the experience put us in the mood to be pummeled by the band's that night.
Harvey Milk is an aquire taste. I had bought this album based on its inclusion on someone's list of essential records. They are a band that is hard to pin down, swinging from soft post-rock passages to a howling cathartic sludgey din. Of the group of us going only one other person had witnessed them live and the two of us knew the rest were in for treat. It's funny how a band's live performance can inform their records. They can put familiar discs in new perspective. The uninitiated among us weren't totally sold on them. Moments into their set slack jaws marked the conversions. I'm not sure the band is still active or touring leastways, if they are you should make the trip, it's jarring.
The show was great all the way through and the lot of us started to make our way back to the car. We walked past unfamiliar landmarks until we blindly wandered into the remnants of what appeared to be some sort of riot. Police with dogs prowler over dozens of hand cuffed people in a eerie quiet. We floated through the mess like ghosts afraid to speak in case it reignited whatever conflict we stumbled into. We eventually made it back to our ride and sat in confusion for a bit. We never found out what actually occurred at that scene. Pittsburgh is a rough town.
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