Fragments of a Fallen Star

Harrow have an interesting technique on this second album that they made together, which is to try to make you forget that you’re listening to it before it really gets started. They achieve that by opening with more than 5 minutes of nothingy ambience and vague musical bits, finally deciding to show their colours as an extreme metal act halfway through the 18 minutes of the title track. By then, I’m already ready for pretty much anything, and that’s what continues to unfold for the rest of the piece, taking in black metal riffing that sounds like Swedish death metal, lots of phased, almost stoner, lead guitar, some annoying rhythmic jamming, and what I thought was throat singing but turns out to be the very particular hum of the bass.

Needless to say that Harrow probably like jamming, although the title track offers the most obvious moments of total abandonment to creativity over the course of Fragments of a Fallen Star. Calling this black metal in a literal sense thus seems pretty weird, especially because I can associate what I hear with stoner just as strongly as any of the North American black stuff that often appears on Hypnotic Dirge Records, who released the version I have. All the spacey synths, dreamy phased lead guitar, and a few doomy riffs (notably the one beginning ‘Keening’) point me in a different direction to the band’s appellation on MA, while the harsh vocals that only appear sparsely have as much of old Paradise Lost about them as anything in the range of the Cascadian scene. The ambience becomes by turns weird and sinister, propelled at moments by the drifting leads and rattling bass that might only have come together previously on a Hooded Menace album.

Indeed, as I listen through the whole experience I’m puzzled more often than I’m reassured by the choices Harrow make. Perhaps some of the odd juxtapositions can be chalked up to a less than optimal sound job, not that any elements are unclear, more that the instruments aren’t always joined together in the best way. That confuses the release tonally, since I had imagined it to be a peaceful and reflective listen based on the themes and opening of the album, yet it shifts and morphs plenty in each song as well as overall, for instance defecting from a sombre slow introduction in ‘Song of Seasons’ to pursue a blackened blast fest for more than half of that track’s length. That doesn’t make it a bad listen, but I’m not always ready for Darkthrone, Bong, and Acid Mothers Temple within 5 minutes of one another. Then again, I should probably have stopped trying to label this halfway through the opener and just let everything go like Harrow obviously did with Fragments of a Fallen Star.