Harrow
Fallow Fields

"To hell with you, your well-being, your conformism! To hell with your masks and your falseness, that's not how I want to live!" I told him, and I left slamming the door.

"And what did you do then, Chris?"

"I followed my dream, Alaska, I traveled for miles and miles trying to reach it... Because if you really want something, you just have to reach out and grab it! This world, this society we live in, we are all strange beasts; the more we have, the more we want, and I had so much, but I decided to throw it all away searching for something that would fill my heart, lungs, and spirit, and give me an indelible memory."

"But how did you travel without money..."

"Ah, money, I burned it after a few hundred kilometers, in the Mojave Desert... I left it there along with the carcass of my trusty Datsun, and I walked, and hitchhiked, and slept outdoors... I met many people, some crazy madmen, some lonely even in company... I almost fell in love, imagine that, and I even found a person I would have liked to call father, but I never stopped, it wasn't what I wanted... And every night I found myself sleeping in a house, I thought that wasn't the ceiling I wanted for my dreams, it was a step forward from the city where I was born and raised, but I was still far from my goal."

"And did you finally make it to Alaska?"

"Oh yes, I made it, and God knows how I felt! True happiness, the heart exploding because it can't contain all those wonders, the perfect communion with Nature, with the animals, in a place where sky and earth embrace... I was free, I was alone too yes, the nights were long and lonely, but I had my books, I had my refuge (you should have seen it, the Magic Bus, as I called it, that wreck of a bus that housed me for nights and weeks on end!).

"And so how did it go, did you stay there?"

"Well, in the end, it didn't go as I'd hoped... I found out that too much happiness kills if not shared, I realized that perhaps I had dared too much, I screwed myself over, let's say, I threw away the only chance I had to feed myself during a cold winter and basically condemned myself to death by eating poisonous plants. Cursed be me! I must have seen them a thousand times, how could I have been wrong, if I still think about it, I eat my hands over it..."

"But where are you now, Chris?"

"Ah, still there, in the bus! Lying on the ground, wrapped in a coat now three times my size, dead suffocated! Supertramp to the end, I decided to die with a smile on my face, and damn if I managed it, although to those poor hunters who found me it seemed more like a grin... Oh, but I was well, eh, I did what I wanted, I lived the way I wanted... Now, excuse me, but I have to run, there's still so much to explore around here... I had a happy life and I thank the Lord. Goodbye and God bless you!"

Natural children of Cascadian Black Metal, the Canadian band Harrow (from Victoria, British Columbia) perfectly embody the ideal prototype of music that a group wanting to label itself as "cascadian" (what an awful thing I wrote!) should play. To be honest, they define their sound as "Atavistic Metal" but I wouldn't add other bizarre labels, although they really have the ability to connect the listener with ancient worlds dominated by Nature, places where man was still a stand-in in a show where the main actors were myths, legends, animals, seasons, and time.

From a musical point of view, there's little to say: those who love the genre will literally be in seventh heaven. Carried away by Ian's voice and superb guitar lines, it's easy to be hypnotized by these four long pieces, where ancient acoustic textures intertwine with fierce black assaults, yet always guided by an underlying melody that makes everything extremely accessible and enjoyable, even for those who might not be accustomed to black metal. As I have had the opportunity to say also on the occasion of the latest release from Alda, post-rock has now proven to be an indispensable base in the construction of these pieces, if it is true that the leading part is constituted by the various emotional climaxes that animate each piece.

This "Fallow Fields" should be taken without a second thought: along with Alda's "Passage" it constitutes a splendid gem of Cascadian Black Metal, at times even surpassing in pathos the "masters" of the genre. There's nothing more to say, you just have to run and immerse yourself as soon as possible in this majestic and shamanic music.