What would happen if, just before they had a chance to record Demanufacture, you'd torn Fear Factory away from sunny California, transported them to grim and frostbitten Norway and imprisoned them in a condemned industrial waste processing plant, riddled with creaking pipes oozing hazardous chemicals from their rusty pores?
Well, for one thing you'd probably only just be coming to the end of a lengthy sentence for human trafficking, but if Burton and the boys were to pass their time in captivity recording their sophomore album it might sound a little like the desperately bleak, unremittingly dark, electronically-tinged extreme metal of Red Harvest.
Some housekeeping here, for anyone scratching their heads and saying "but n0teeth, I thought this blog was about industrial music, not heavy metal bands who fart around with keyboards and samplers?": I don't consider Red Harvest industrial any more than I consider Fear Factory industrial, but I do love them regardless (see "and maybe some other music as well" caveat in the header). I do think that out of all the inarguably metal bands that have incorporated elements of electronic (if not necessarily industrial) music into their sound, they've both done a better job of it than, say, every truly terrible Finnish (why are they always fucking Finnish?) cyber metal band to have offended the n0teeth listening team's ears.
There's a faint glimmer of hope running through Fear Factory's tales of AI run amuck, cyborg uprisings and surveillance state oppression; perhaps it's an inevitable part of being a Norwegian metal band but no such hope glimmers, however faintly, in Red Harvest's harsh dystopian landscapes. While Fear Factory often sound like they're warning of the incoming apocalypse, Red Harvest sound like they've already lived it, and are now morosely trudging the Earth's increasingly ravaged surface like atomic priests who tried to warn us all. That's not to say they're not an enjoyable listen: the Oslo quintet have a knack for pairing catchy riffs with dense drum programming and haunting orchestral keyboard washes. It's debatable how "industrial" they are in their sound or their approach, but the overall effect is certainly "gothic" in places.
Godflesh, too, is a comparison worth making here: while the Harvest's thrash metal roots are evident in their faster songs, in their most dour, plodding, doom-laden (and occasionally breakbeat-dub-influenced!) moments they owe a clear debt to Birmingham's most prolific metal musician and his more electronically-focused side projects. Aesthetically, however, Red Harvest inhabit a post-digital world of corroded circuitry and rotting silicon (I'm sure at least one of these is the name of a Frontline Assembly song), in contrast to the Fleshies' rusting ironworks of post-industrial, post-Thatcher desolation.
Red Harvest are more than just some Norwegian metal band, and more than some dilettantes slapping the odd electronic flourish on their music and calling it a day. This is the soundtrack to a nuclear winter, not the snowy Norwegian forests your average black metal bands like to frolic around in. We'll leave you with the following gem from their Discogs bio, which neatly sums up their crushing power:
They have never been part of the controversial black metal scene, yet their best music contains more than enough energy to burn down churches by its sonic impact alone.