The Slow Harvest uses songwriting as unburdening – a deep, personal catharsis without the psychiatrist. Their debut album, Selections From The Sad Bastard Songbook, is unflinching in its handling of seriously heavy subject matter, but it does so with hinting subtleties, cloaking the meanings under a blanket of singer/songwriter Americana with a moody, half-lit, prairie noir twist that is wonderfully listenable. Selections From The Sad Bastard Songbook, are the stories of life’s fleeting joys and inevitable sorrows. Tales of the all-too-real human condition, simultaneously awe-inspiring and heartbreaking. Songs written for those who know that our daily lives are nothing but theater, with each person playing lead in a self-inflicted fantasy. We see the American Dream exposed as a cycle of indentured servitude. Social norms and universal truths revealed as schemes for control of the masses. The boxes and binaries of the given are pulled apart, deconstructed in search of what it means to exist as a human. These are songs written for those who know we are all prisoners, incarcerated on a rock hurtling headlong into the infinite void. For those who know there is no such thing as winning and no such thing as being right. No beginning and no end. These are songs about the hard-won redemptive power of love, survivor’s guilt, and the crippling fear of being alone. These are the things we are too scared to confront during the daylight hours, but that unfailingly return to haunt us come the long nightfall. Recommended for fans of Blaze Foley, Kris Kristofferson, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and contemporaries, Chris Knight, The White Buffalo, Arlo McKinley, John Moreland, and Joshua Ray Walker.
