Famine Harvest - Suncrusher

I was scrolling through our promos the other day I wound up across and interestingly titled project called Famine Harvest based out of Seattle, Washington in the United States. This band is hailed by r_Wilhelm whose main project is Where The Sun Is Silent. I've never heard of his other project before but it's worth a mention for anyone who wants to hear the rest of this dude's discography. As stated by my rant before this paragraph, Famine Harvest likes to think of himself as black metal meets industrial. I think differently. 

Throughout the duration of Suncrusher, his most recent album that released back in June, I found myself attributing the dragging synths and ghostly styles more or less to witch house than black metal, and aside from distorted vocals which is more industrial than black metal in the first place, I couldn't find all too many black metal influences. Perhaps that lies within the bands title and heroes, but musically I didn't find the term black metal necessary to use. As usual, this does not detract from the score at all; I just like to flesh things out a bit and poke at genres like the rest of the music crowd. Anyway, onto my dissection of Suncrusher, 

The album begins off with 'Burial' which is a song that would aptly go well as an instrumental. It sounds like a blend of 80s synths, a horrifying dream sequence, and Satan himself coming forth to try his best at singing. I would like to even call it a slowed down and spookier styled synthpop song, but even that would be wrong. It's unique in itself. 

'Salt' ventures into darker territory that blends guitar sounds, an electronic beat, and distorted vocals all together. The chorus is bountiful and spine tingling. 'Ventricle' keeps up the noise and lofi sound found within the other tracks. 'Apostate' is a fairly weak track that just uses turned up synths for a majority of the song. I didn't like it and deemed it skip worthy. 

While the first minute or so of 'Sigtless' was fairly bland, I absolutely adored the downtempo feel of the rest of the track. It was well executed and the noisey ambiance that paired next to the rest of the song was awesome. It also transitions right into the next track 'Lay To Ruin'. I think that Famine Harvest should have just kept it to one title and had a flowing ten minute track instead of two broken up tracks, but that's just personal opinion. Either way, 'Lay To Ruin' was another astounding track and both these songs together made up my favorite section on the album. 

The next two tracks 'There is No Safe Word' and 'Withdrawn' continued the sound of the previous two tracks with plenty of modifications to make them stand out a bit more. The last song, however, was another weak track that I just could not get into. It sounded as if Famine Harvest was trying to blend pop into dark electro but couldn't find middle ground between the two. 

If you're too dull witted to figure it out, I do find that Famine Harvest has a couple of wrinkles that need to be ironed out before they can really move on in the world. Certain songs such as 'Apostate' and 'When the Wolves Came' don't belong on this album unless they were to get an extreme makeover. The production values on the album aren't top notch and I think that Famine Harvest should find a way to tighten that up, but the lofi noise makes it kind of charming and I believe that's what they were going for in the first place. 

Suncrusher is good, Famine Harvest has a threshold, and I'm hoping he's able to flesh out this project into the beast that it can be. 
Aug 22 2016