“It’s a bad man’s world, but a good man’s countryside,” sings Cory Reinisch on Harvest Thieves’ sophomore album, As the Sparks Fly Upward. The line captures the central tension of the band’s long-awaited follow-up to 2016’s Rival, attempting to make sense of a globe grown cruel but still capable of such incredible beauty. Opening triptych “Birth of a Salesman,” “Cadillacs in the Sky,” and “Mercy Kill” offers invective against the current state of politics, religion, and social mendacity, yet steeps nostalgia for a time before values became so twisted. The sweet memories and soft fiddle of “McCulloch County Wind Chimes” hit all the more powerfully between Annah Fissette’s breathless, biting lead on “Gaslighter” and the self-destructive punch of “Friendly Fire.” The LP’s backside mellows behind the easy roll of “Golden Age” and barroom regrets of Graham Weber’s “Avenue A,” while Fissette slides in gorgeously wrought heartache with “Unrequited.” Throughout, the band cuts their smart, blistering narratives with a tight alt.country sound that doesn’t shy from the genre’s Nineties roots. Closer “Empire Falls” epitomizes that pull, setting the political against the personal, contrasting the world raging outside with the warm embrace of a lover: “They’re storming the walls while the empire falls, and all I can think of is you.”
This article appears in October 20 • 2023.
