Artist: Harvest / Drowning The Light
Country: Australia
Label: Dark Adversary Productions
Formats: Split CD
Year: 2024
While waiting for newest album of Australia’s most prolific Black Metal titan, Drowning The Light, we were surprised by no less than three new shorter releases. A reissue of the very rare and obscure first demo, a split with Nocturnal Deviancy and this split with Harvest. It is no understatement that this is quite different from what I was expecting, since the new Drowning The Light album will in fact be a 5-album set, so compared to that mammoth-like body of work that still awaits us, this merely 20-minute split CD is a rather light snack.
Although Drowning The Light is by far Azgorh’s most well-known musical vehicle, he chooses to have a couple more – for his spare hours, I suppose. Harvest, kicking off this split, is one of those other projects. And while Iron Bonehead Productions reissued the last two of Harvest’s full-length albums, the last time we had something completely new to chew on was 2021’s ‘Bend Thy Knee & Present Thy Throat To A Burning Sword Of A Dark Age’. Those familiar with Harvest’s music might confess that it is not entirely different from Azgorh’s main focus, Drowning The Light. The melancholic riffing and melodies, it clearly wears Azgorh’s recognizable signature. This very track sounds a bit more stripped down and Rock-based than the full-length material, but obviously just continues the same musical direction of the previously released recordings. Personally I love the two breaks in the music and the goblin-like murmur in the second, it gives the track a rather creepy atmosphere that perfectly suits the overall Vampyric theme.
Drowning The Light’s contribution to this split fits seamlessly to what he already served us with Harvest, yet this track is just built upon the very same cornerstones as the recordings from the last few years. The heavy use of organ-like keyboards take the lead, at least in the melodic department. The icy riffs and the croaky vocals, so typifying Drowning The Light’s music, are still there, but pushed way more to the back compared to the band’s early and mid-period material. With its repeating melodies, it is both raw and a total ear-worm that keeps resonating in your soul. This altogether serves the melancholic spirit of the music – again, a seamless fit the Vampyric theme.
As with the majority of the music from the past few years, this split has an overarching theme. Both tracks evolve around Robert Bloch’s ‘The Shambler From The Stars’, a rather short story, first published in the Weird Tales magazine of late 1935 (Marvel fans might recognize it from their rendition from 1972). It is a rather Lovecraft-like story in which the narrator meets like-minded people through written correspondence, people from all over the world who are searching for the occult. At one point, one of them reads a manuscript aloud; a big mistake. A cosmic monster, a star vampire appears and feasts on the poor soul’s blood. Although the vampire, first appearing as an icy wind, gradually takes on a form of its own, soon disappearing into the depths of the cosmic chasms, the narrator is never the same and still feels the vampire’s presence.
‘Invoking A Star Shambler’ is, to cut a long story short, quite a matching soundtrack to this old and chilling tale from a time where ghost-stories were actually challenging, thought provoking and overall scary.
