Artist: Jason Hawk Harris
Album: Love & The Dark
Label: Bloodshot Records
Release Date: 8.23.19
Hopefully, the worst is behind Jason Hawk Harris. Picking up the pieces after wrestling with addiction and coming to grips with terrible misfortune – from his dad’s financial ruin, to the death of an alcoholic mother, and a sister stricken with multiple sclerosis whose son was born premature with cerebral palsy—Harris makes his life an open book on Love & The Dark. Every chapter is a page-turner, and the ending is utterly transcendent.
In stretching the boundaries of traditional roots music with a more progressive and arty approach, Harris employs his background in classical composition and his love of Queen in building the crashing crescendos and cosmic expansiveness of opener “The Smoke and the Stars” and closer “Grandfather.” With their humble beginnings as quietly affecting country ballads, the Southern Gothic bookends to Love & The Dark slowly transform into wondrous spectacles, their rising instrumental tides leading to a powerful release of emotions amid the captivatingly beautiful bombast. When Harris sings, “Let me live in those green eyes of yours” at the conclusion of “The Smoke and the Stars,” it sounds like a yearning, last-ditch effort to hold onto something real and his grip is slipping.
And yet, for all of Harris’ lush, countrypolitan sophistication, with its weathered wraiths of pedal and lap steel and accents of dobro, harmonium and violin, as well as its rolling piano cascades and surges, Love & The Dark has a wild streak a mile long. The blistering rockabilly of “I’m Afraid” humorously puts the fear of Jesus in a youthful Harris, while a rollicking and propulsive “Confused” falls in love too fast and its slightly more relaxed kissing cousin “Cussing at the Light” drinks to heal a broken heart. Substance abuse and its destructive effects on domestic life are lamented in the ultra-catchy, alternative-country whirligig “Giving In,” wrapping an addict’s remorse in a corset of tight hooks and an aching, self-flagellating chorus, before death’s presence is felt in the uneasy “Phantom Limb” and the gently sweeping “Blessed Interruption” assumes an uplifting and graceful smile.
Harris, who has toured and performed with indie-folk idealists The Show Ponies, has a way with pop melodies, too, and the marriages of his tarnished country croon to female voices both soft and assertive yield unassuming, light harmonies that seem comforting and warm, yet worldly. His soul splattered with punk-rock graffiti, Harris is a colorful writer, highly literate and intelligent, but also unafraid to get his hands dirty or go to places others with less courage might avoid.
Finding his way through Love & The Dark—a strong contender for Americana album of the year—starts with taking a good hard look in the mirror for Harris. Jackson Browne and Gram Parsons, not to mention contemporaries such as Ryan Bingham, Jason Isbell and Robert Ellis, are staring right back.
—Peter Lindblad
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