(written by Islander)
Not all bands make music with a sense of place, with a connection to the environment that surrounds them and their experiences in that particular setting. Instead, the music might sound like it could have been conceived and created anywhere. But Salt Lake City’s Harvest of Ash definitely do have that connection. Here’s an introduction from their Bandcamp page:
Salt Lake City’s geography is a study of contrasts. Towering mountains, expressing power and grandeur, meet with desert emptiness – a completely flat limitlessness where barely a shrub is able to grow. Enormous and overwhelming, three-piece doom band Harvest of Ash conjures both the magnificence of mountain ranges and the desolation of barren deserts.
The band’s music is also equally rooted in their own experiences within that environment, including various chaotic calamities that hindered the completion of their new album Castaway, which is now set for release on March 6th. Here’s how they describe the new songs’ lyrical journey:
A main theme of the work is the idea of ‘amor fati,’ or love of fate. This is the notion of living life in an authentic way, embracing every decision and path taken – good and bad – as uniquely your own, that you would do everything the same way again. This makes Castaway a deeply personal statement about when you feel the bottom has dropped out of your life, and reclaiming value in yourself during these times.
How Harvest of Ash have made this “deeply personal statement” through music is exemplified by “Embracing,” a song from Castaway that we’re premiering today.
It is a punishingly heavy experience, both emotionally and in the weight of its decibels. The drums sound like bombs going off; the bass rumbles like a subterranean earthquake; the groaning depth-charge chords shiver with radioactive abrasion; the piercing lead-guitar seems to writhe in misery. The vocals vent gritty howls and scarring screams.
The riffing also slowly worms its way forward like a giant serpent through the heaving megaton heaviness, and inflicts lurching stomps. The lead guitar continues piercing the mind in changing ways, ringing and wailing up in the rafters like ghosts in agony while the rhythm section continue to ruthlessly hammer and chew up the foundations, the bass nourishing itself with concrete.
The band also continue changing the tempos, and when they decelerate in the song’s final phase, the bellowing voice reaches new heights of intensity, feedback assaults the senses, and the music blazes and crushes like an inescapable cataclysm.
That song alone demonstrates just how stupefyingly heavy the new music is, and how deeply its searing melodies can dig under a listener’s skin. Here’s what Harvest of Ash have to say about it:
The second track, “Embracing,” reveals the results of pairing heavy music with introspective lyrics. The opening section’s southern rock-inspired guitar lines give way to riffs that are just plain mean.
As the drums deftly move between time signatures, the bass thunders through the track like a big rig truck, and the guitars use feedback like an additional instrument. At its closing, a tranquil interlude of drum and bass gives way to an absolutely devastating breakdown.
The vocals discharge a manifesto about embracing change – “ALL PRAISE NEW WAYS!”
We would also like to draw your attention to the album’s first advance track and title song, “Castaway“. Prepare to get crushed and mauled again.
Once more, the bass seizes attention right away, but with a dismal whine, and the drums again detonate and pop like munitions. And speaking of mean riffs, this song has them in spades, generating both a brutal mid-paced surge and a slow-motion catastrophe, as well as sensations that eerily contort, coldly clang, and jolt like some industrial-strength die stamp.
Once again, the vocals are as harrowing as a sucking chest wound, and the peal of the lead guitars renders dismay, pain, and feverish yearning in arresting ways. As before, the tempo is also dynamic, but at all speeds the music won’t just get your head moving but will also bend you up and down at the waist.
HARVEST OF ASH is:
Pepper Glass: guitar/vocals
Mike DiTullio: drums/percussion
Ben Dodds: bass
Castaway was recorded and mixed by Wes Johnson at Archive Recordings in Salt Lake, and it was mastered by Stephan Hawkes in North Hollywood, CA. It’s up for pre-order now:
PRE-ORDER:
https://harvestofash.bandcamp.com/album/castaway
HARVEST OF ASH:
https://linktr.ee/harvestofash
https://facebook.com/harvestofash/
https://www.instagram.com/harvestofash