Hamsoken - Foul Harvest
Hamsoken's Foul Harvest is one of those albums that you turn on and think “This is the shit!” — and then by the end of it you’re wondering if you’ll really ever want to listen to it again. It’s almost great, but isn’t, and then it somehow manages not even to be all that good.
Initially, as I said, it certainly seems to hit all the right hideous yowls. Nick Forte is best known for his hardcore band Rorschach, but if you didn’t know that, you’d think he’d been slogging through black Satanic pits ever since he was spawned. Unholy, semi-buried, throat-shredding vocals, lurching scraping industrial percussion, trudging riffs giving way to ambient hiss — it’s all in there.
And yet, on closer inspection you start to wonder if Forte shouldn’t have stuck with hardcore, a genre in which one good idea is enough to give you a track, and where complex songwriting, while always appreciated (hat tip to the Minutemen) isn’t necessarily a requirement. In metal, on the other hand, you generally do need a sense of structure — and Forte doesn’t appear to have one. Thus, “The Dark Ages Never Ended,” opens with a cool-ass bottom-heavy riff, swaggery enough to evoke a fiendishly decaying Aerosmith. But then...nothing happens. The riff just repeats over and over pretty much, with requisite shrieking and banging over it. The song is too fast to really crush you like doom; too straightforward to give you proggy whiplash like thrash or death. The production does have some of the evil layered buzz of Xasthur or Striborg, but it can’t really follow it’s muse into the ambient abyss because there’s that damn riff, repeating over and over, as if to say, “You know, I had this one good thought, and I’m going to stick with it until something better comes along.”
And so it goes throughout the album; Forte has the gift of demonic inspiration, but lacks the ingenious tenacity of the truly blasphemous. You can see this even in the best track on the album; the final one, “It Burns.” Like the rest of Foul Harvest, “It Burns” is repetitive, but the tempo here is faster. Perhaps even more importantly, the song is short; only 2 minutes as compared to the 3 to 4 of the other tracks. In fact, “It Burns” is the moment on the album that most seems to hearken back to Forte’s hardcore past; one memorable riff, attitude, a concluding distorted classic-rock guitar solo, and you’re done. It’s not especially ambitious, but it works — which is more than can be said, unfortunately, for the bulk of the album.
Recommended Tracks: “It Burns,” “The Dark Ages Never Ended”
