RED HARVEST
Apocalypse Is Now
By: Nathan T. Birk
It's been nearly a year and a half since Red Harvest's last album, Cold Dark Matter -- an album that, by most accounts, cued a larger audience into these Norwegians' apocalyptic metal. However, all has not been quiet on the northern front....
In the interim, Red Harvest have been diligently crafting their fifth (and quizzically titled) album, Sick Transit Gloria Mundi -- by the time you read this, the album will have hit the streets for you to absorb, digest, and disconnect/reconnect your frontal lobe.
But before we get into more-pressing matters, what's up with that album title?
"It's Latin, and it's an old saying, by an emperor of old Rome or something," begins guitarist/central songwriter Kjetil Eggum, AKA Selveste Turbonatas. "It means 'the glory of the world is passing away'. If I were to say it very (literally), 'this passes the worldly glory', but we just added the 'sick' thing to make it sicker," he laughs.
SICK, indeed, but STGM is no laughing matter. Rather, it's one where matter collides, cold and dark as it is, frequencies familiar but mostly foreign doing a danse macabre back 'n' forth between two liquidated channels conveniently located between your eardrums. D-d-dense doesn't even begin to describe this latest Red Harvest, one that has spaciously ballooned yet paradoxically constricted the band's oppressive palate into a post-apocalypse slo-mo horror-show that resembles what would happen if Godflesh, Voivod, Killing Joke, and Neurosis all had somehow hijacked one of the Empire's destroyers from the Star Wars films, all of 'em somehow good 'n' gravely goofed-up in unison after an intense smart-bar session, and all somehow managed to hurtle the thing forward, spitting rust and exhaust and ill tidings outward into an expansive space otherwise occupied by (here it comes again) cold dark matter.
PLACE YOUR BETS: MAN VS. MACHINE
Going back to phrases -- y'know, 'this passes the worldly glory' -- there's that one about how 'resistance is futile'. In terms of the new album, is resistance indeed futile? To this writer, when faced with an otherworldly something so demandingly dense and utterly overwhelming that you're sickly drawn to it yet truly want to fight against it, few options exist other than standing paralyzed in awe at its crater-caking eclipse.
Is this newest album a commentary on modern technology and music?
"I mean, some of the songs are about that, [how] machines are more and more taking over," the six-stringer reveals. "We'd like to think that we need a man or a woman to operate machines, but sometimes we are so controlled -- we like to think that we are the people running the machines, but actually the machines are running us. I'm not just (talking about) computers, but when you watch TV -- you feel like you're free to choose what channel to watch, but there are still people controlling what you're seeing, there's people controlling what you read.... Even if you want to play Playstation, people programmed it and decided how they wanted it to look like, so it's total paranoia."
Eggum breaks the tension with a smirk, then the intonation turns grave. "If you start thinking about how things actually are, we think that we're free and all, but I don't think we are."
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