For the past decade and a half, Jeremy Harrison’s stock in trade, first with Banderas and then Honeyspiders, has been a tumultuous musical attack where volume was a palpable member of the band. Fans of Harrison’s amps-to-11 and Jagger swagger approach might find the relative quietude of his debut solo album, Songs of Love and Blight, somewhat disarming, but repeated listenings will reveal that Harrison’s intended impact is achieved with emotion and passion rather than sheer volume.
That being said, the album’s opening track, “Flower Weaver,” begins with a swirling cacophony of sound and fury that is quickly accompanied by a plucked acoustic guitar and Harrison’s sonorous vocals, sounding like a mournful dirge sung from the bottom of a well. “A Mouth Filled with Sky/A Wound Filled with Clouds” follows a similar blueprint, with a noisily amorphous introduction that suggests Brian Eno conducting an undulating swarm of bees, which gives way to an added folky guitar epilogue, successfully creating a forcefully ambient campfire song. “Crook of Rain” finds Harrison channeling the likes of Nick Cave, Iggy Pop and the late Mark Lanegan at the microphone, with a soundscape that could have been a demo for an Afghan Whigs/The National collaboration. The song abruptly cuts off at two-and-a-half minutes; it might have been nice to hear it meander for an equal amount of time, but Harrison was intent on serving brevity with his expansiveness.
The wonder of Songs of Love and Blight is the album’s sonic diversity which, like many works released in the past five years, was crafted during the relative vacuum of the Covid quarantine. Written and recorded in the seclusion of Harrison’s home studio, the album boasts funereal Gothic structures (“Panoptica”), dark 16 Horsepower-tinged Americana (“Aster,” “Strange Familiars, “The Jewel in the Well”), and aggressively dark wave hymnal ambience (“Chased Paths,” “Banishment Song”).
The sonic diversity of Songs of Love and Blight is a product of Harrison’s lo-fi bedroom recording and his willingness to allow the songs themselves to dictate their direction. He also consciously avoided the hard rock tropes that have successfully steered his band incarnations in favor of the liberating experimentalism of his solo persona, mixing hallucinatory psychedelic folk with electronic drone and texturally gripping sound collage. Because of its unique origin story, the compelling and shiver-inducing Songs of Love and Blight may never be exactly replicated, but Jeremy Harrison has effectively proven his capabilities as a solo artist, and his next sonic excursion could easily be more exciting than his pioneering debut.
Listen to Songs of Love and Blight on Bandcamp.
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This article appears in Jun 11-24, 2025.