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BARREN HARVEST  Beautiful Flowers  3 x 7" BOXSET   (Black Horizons)   24.00


    Back in stock. This amazing ghostfolk duo is back with more of their hauntingly beautiful music, bringing us their earliest recordings via this gorgeously assembled collection. Beautiful Flowers is the earliest material from the duo of Jessica Way (Worm Ouroboros) and Lenny Smith (Trees, Atriarch), featured here in all of its stark beauty spread across the six sides of a triple 7" set. If you dug the band's debut album Subtle Cruelties that came out late last year (and which I raved about upon its release), this stuff is just as terrific. Fans might recognize a few of these tracks ("The Bleeding", "Claw And Feather"), as they would appear in reworked form on that album. But this set is worth picking up if you're as enthralled with Barren Harvest as I am, as these early versions can differ a bit from what appeared on Cruelties.

    It's gorgeous, ghostly music, the songs stripped down to spare arrangements of just vocals alongside the lush strum of the acoustic guitar and their slowly swirling synthesizer. Way and Smith weave their voices together through each song, his gravelly baritone billowing beneath her icy, lilting melodies. It's steeped in an occult folk tradition, with echoes of classic witch-folk outfits like Comus and contemporaries like Stone Breath, but there's also a grave majesty to these songs that reminds me a bit of Dead Can Dance, further distinguishing Barren Harvest's music from other current neo-folk outfits. Even their cover of the ancient English folk song "Gently Johnny" (best remembered by most from the score to The Wicker Man) is here transformed into something almost unrecognizable from previous versions, imbued with so much sorrow that the meaning behind the lyrics transforms into something much more dire. All of these songs drift beneath the cold red glow of an autumn moon, delicate strands of dried flower and ivy woven through the lush chords and dramatic singing, offering another shadow-wreathed example of how this sort of grave, gorgeous, gothic folk-flecked darkness can be as grim and powerful as any doom metal outfit. And it's beautifully packaged, the three records housed in a printed slipcase, each record in a plastic sleeve with its own printed lyric sheet, all printed in silver ink on black woven stock, issued in a limited edition of three hundred thirty-three copies.