The Harvest Ministers: "Little Dark Mansion" (Sarah)

Is it too obvious to suggest that the territory which The Harvest Ministers delve into is that which in recent times has been most notably covered by the likes of The Go-Betweens, McLennan and Forster in their individual incarnations and possibly Prefab Sprout, Roddy Frame (of Aztec Camera fame) and Edwyn Collins? If any one of the above have at any stage stolen your heart away then consider and compare their first albums and evaluate whether or not it is an exaggeration to include Little Dark Mansion in such exalted company.

What The Harvest Ministers seem to have in common with their illustrious peers, those defunct and those transmutated, is the search for a more gentle existence in the midst of an industrial urbanisation that has gone drastically wrong and an attempt to find a musical form which adequately reflects the human in an inhuman environment. There is, in The Harvest Ministers, the same articulation of isolation, alienation and an ambiguity about the advantages and disadvantages of these quandaries as there is in their suggested precursors.

Consider, for example, the opening lines of the jocund 'Fictitious Christmas' as co-ordinates of songwriter, vocalist and guitarist William Merriman's internal and psychic cartography, as he waxes surreal on what could be a uniquely personal but is also, very apparently, an all too commonly universal predicament amongst partners who are too stubborn or unimaginative to either love or leave one another, trapped as they are in the debris of all kinds of decay "An old building with filthy stairs/A dead smell betrays the years/ . . ./A hand touches a hand and craves it/Say what we need is Fictitious Christmas to rid us of this fictitious Christmas/A polite word hasn't passed between them/Not since she got it in her head/To slam doors and get on his nerves/The worst is he's as deaf as chairs/Say what we need is....."

The thoughtfully introspective title track itself 'Little Dark Mansion', not only exemplifies the, at times, highly metaphorical nature of Merriman's words but also reinforces the homely hearth, cinders and ashes of The Harvest Ministers' fertile lyrical terrain, "Where I dwell's a little dark mansion I inherited from you/Left balancing on a concrete block is an unhinged gate out the back."

In spite of the fact that the band may not have had total say in the selection of the tracks for this album it's difficult to find a weak selection anywhere. Besides those ditties already mentioned there's the distinctive lonesome and solitary cry of 'I Hang From A Great Big Oak' and it's chokingly hung vocals, as well as the dirge-like 'Dominique'. Thanks to an array of instrumentation that includes clarinet, saxophone, piano and violin, and the added option of Gerardette Bailey's wistful voice The Harvest Ministers have such a range of musical textures at their disposal that they truly defy any simplistic categorisation. Already their musical scope extends beyond that of most of their assumed influences.

You can bank on it that there's not a number on Little Dark Mansion that won't haunt your sleeping and waking hours. Invest in it now. "Can you not see?/Can you not feel?/Something like love/Is never quite real/Until you're away sick and afraid . . .", sings Merriman on 'Grey Matters'.

Believe me, if you don't pay a visit to this humble palace of wisdom and excess then you'll probably feel very monochrome indeed.

Patrick Brennan.