Darknight
Here we have killer riffs of doom and sludge metal merged with post metal, Harvest of Ash create five tracks of the stages of the migraine and it sounds miserable.
Favorite track: III Headache.
Salt Lake City’s Harvest of Ash is unleashing their debut full length – Ache and Impulse. Metal maestro Andy Patterson (Sub Rosa, The Otolith) recorded the album. Philadelphia’s Horror Pain Gore Death Productions is releasing it.
Ache and Impulse builds from a migraine headache’s four stages. We become ensnared in the morals of broken people (prodrome and aura). These narrow standards stifle our instincts and gifts (headache). Yet, we can emerge from this mental fog and embrace who we truly are (postdrome).
Anchoring this journey is a meticulous blend of doom and post metal, sludge, and hardcore. Colossal riffs, spacey interludes, and triumphant resolutions fill these tracks. Enthralling and devastating, Harvest of Ash push the boundaries while bringing the beatdown.
This eclectic sound is little surprise given the band’s origins. It is the culmination of members Grahm Reynolds (bass), Mike DiTullio (drums), and Pepper Glass (guitar and vocals) playing for decades in both East and West coast projects. After they found themselves in Utah, they found each other.
And the experience of creating a migraine themed album? With a wry smile, they’ll tell you that it’s been one big headache.
LYRICS:
Harvest of Ash
(Our deeply submerged mental deception – sustaining rigid moral systems, keeping a positive attitude, and ignoring past trauma – becomes unmanageable. We face a reckoning.)
Sow our seeds on barren land
Harvest is due
I Prodrome
(We realize how much we repress and punish ourselves. Instead of protecting and nurturing our instincts and gifts, we have been supporting the agenda of others.)
We gave them mayhem
Blessed broken ways
Shimmer certainty
Facing decadence, you resign
To design, the divine
Searing season’s threat
Dawning of regret
Facing turbulence, medicine
I will bring, you will cling
II Aura
(We slowly recognize our personality and its foundations. This also means undermining our previous inclinations, realizing how they have hurt us.)
Embrace the ache
Dismiss death wish
Undermine
Your promised land, is sinking sand
III Headache
(We become outraged at the world, grasping how it is filled with broken people. In misguided attempts to become whole, they build monuments to themselves, desperately wanting us to follow their standards and give them power.)
We’ll be fine, putridly rise
Wine dark times
Our seas swirl, drown your pearls
Rush and crash and swell
Filth and rot, our release
All sad things
Blinding dumb, far past numb
Ache and rash and sting
Built by shame
Monuments to our shame
So they’ll mourn our name
Worlds of fear, worlds of love
Pummel-embrace in one
Words of fear, words deny
Veiling our lives from life
IV Postdrome
(We give up our self-destructive relationships and ideals. Instead of feeding the emptiness of others and drowning in shame, we embrace ourselves, living genuinely by our terms.)
All thy passions, in the end virtues
All thy devils, in the end angels*
My eyes restrain
My heart mistakes
Sullen and swollen, stretched lips
Sullen and swollen, last kiss / such pigs
There is not one best way
There is not final say
* Adapted from Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”
FULL LENGTH "ACHE AND IMPULSE" out now on Horror Pain Gore Death Productions. Limited edition t-shirt design available here: hpgd.bandcamp.com/album/ache-and-impulse
