Subtle Cruelties is the alluring debut from gothic folk duo Barren Harvest, featuring music that is pretty far removed from the sort of harrowing, blackened heaviness I'm accustomed to hearing from member Lenny Smith. With his often terrifying, emotionally abject vocal work for the extreme doom outfit Trees and the blackened, death-rock influenced sludge of Atriarch, Smith's voice serves as a conduit to violent, soul-charring forces, navigating the extremes of human experience. With Barren Harvest, though, Smith joins with Worm Ouroboros member Jessica Way to craft a much more fragile and introspective sound, drawing from dark neo-folk traditions and classic ambient music to evoke a beautifully gloomy atmosphere that moves like slow-drifting storm clouds across the whole of Cruelties.

    Over a somber backdrop of droning synthesizers and gently plucked acoustic strings, the duo trade off their plaintive voices, Way's light, delicate singing winding around Smith's deep drawling baritone, and this vocal interplay is more than a little reminiscent of some of the bleaker late-era Swans material; in those moments when the two singers come together (such as the eerie, heartbreaking "Heavens Age"), this album can be positively bewitching. But while the slow, brooding strum of acoustic guitars are ingrained throughout the album, giving this that vaguely neo-folky feel, it's their use of gleaming synthesizers that's really at the heart of Barren Harvest's gorgeously grim sound. Those folkier elements are mostly infused into the background, obscured by sweeping blacklit synths, bits of acoustic guitar here, some delicate minor key piano there, streaking some songs with the echoing lilt of an autoharp and an Indian stringed instrument called the bulbul tarang, whose metallic buzz drones through some of the album's more solemn moments. Everything is wrapped in a soft crepuscular haze of reverb that definitely contributes to the album's "gothy" vibe, and the songs sometimes drift into a kind of shadowed chamber-pop beauty that can definitely evoke Way's work with Worm Ouroboros, as well as the spectral strains of Amber Asylum. All good reference points for Barren Harvest's orphic ambience, and it's also somewhat like a somnambulant and stoned channeling of White Light From the Mouth of Infinity-era Swans, but draped in sheets of velvety, slowly shifting kosmische keyboards. A beautifully bleak song-suite, richly evocative of an autumnal atmosphere limned in the burnt amber glow of dying sunlight, each note weighted with a deep weariness.

    Available on both limited edition CD and limited vinyl from Handmade Birds, though vinyl enthusiasts should note that the Lp version is a shorter version of the album, missing five tracks featured on the CD.