Blessed Frost
Soil
The Sleepy Old Man
Storm Watch
Evening and Devotion
Gown
1736 (byrd)
Scattering
Memory and Conflict
Failures Rose
The Invisible
Love in War
Awake and Arise
Untitled

Take note that this is not a new Harvest Rain album, per se. Rather it is a reissue of 1997's Evening and Devotion released on Haunted Showers Music and as such take heed that it is but the chrysalis of Harvest Rain, being of low-fi audio quality and haunted analogue folk tracks rustling with as much mastering as can be afforded to limited access to recording equipment; a tape album for all intense purposes distributed at the time by Jason Thompkins' own aforementioned label.

The music of Harvest Rain encapsulates the haunted southern America, the lonely byways of forgotten cemeteries hung under corpulent skies; the very same skies that birth life out of death and decay. Even under the most blasted and withered crops of summer overseen by the mimicking grotesquerie, parched scarecrows, are rills of life manifest in spirits and haunted souls. By his own admission, Thompkins has an obsession with ghosts, specifically the civil war spirits of the cemetery where he was raised. Nature and the paranormal are less thematic than extended band members, as dark folk is multitudinous Harvest Rain defines its essence with close attentiveness to the land and its intertwined shadow. The music swims murky strokes of acoustic guitar, shivering autumnal decay in the distorted swirls of approaching, wintered electric guitar. The vocals, fading contrails of parable and folk-story, restore Thompkins' "skeleton on the table" with sinew and muscle, fitting morbidezza for the antique somberness of Harvest Rain's etudes.

Even with such poor mastering and absence of stereo gloss Songs from Evening elicits panoply of musicianship and memorable song-craft that heralds and shores Harvest Rain's auspicious future, if even from this perspective of some eight years past.

NYR