Review | Nick Mulvey – Dark Harvest Pt.1 

Label: Supernatural Records

Julian Laws

Three years was worth the wait.

Ahead of an anticipated world tour, Nick Mulvey navigates listeners through an album that is so established and realised, it feels as if it has been around for years.

Meditating on the human condition, ‘Dark Harvest Pt.1‘ consoles listeners on their own trials and tribulations. Dark Harvest Pt1 soundtracks fans to the existentialism one can feel in the modern day world. With sounds so indicative of Nick Mulveys previous works – folk/flamenco guitar parts, raw, close vocals, and profound lyrics – ‘Dark Harvest Pt.1‘ illuminates the hardships Mulvey has experienced in the intervening time between this and his last album (New Mythologies, 2022).

Nick Mulvey stated that “these years have been tenderising” which is a phrase that so perfectly encapsulates the emotional movement and message of this album – feeling tenderised like a slab of meat by the brutality of life but also how this process simultaneously teaches you and makes you more tender, allowing you to surrender to your pain. 

Opening with ‘Solastalgia’ (a philosophy that explains the feeling of homesickness when you are still at home) the listener is reminded of the musicianship we have all so dearly missed. With Imogen Heap-esque on backing vocals and a guitar that tremors, Mulvey succeeds in cycling listeners through the feelings of nostalgia but the alienation one can feel even when you are experiencing the comforts of home.

The titular track ‘Dark Harvest’ immediately opens with “In an age of separation and impersonal desire, I hungered for her liberation” with powerful chords played on the piano, establishing the song and creating a myriad of threatening realisations. The song is a meditation on catharsis, on how you should learn to reap the fruits of the lessons that a ‘dark harvest’ can produce. Mulvey personifies his pain, “aching to untie her” he wants to know his pain “to its marrow, to feel the longing in the bone” whilst marching along to the drums that underpin the song, ever onwards to the precipice of hope. 

Track four ‘Hey How Was Your Day?’ is a beautiful interlude in which a voice recording plays throughout about how ‘rejection is God’s protection’ and how one must become completely unrejectable to become so freely themselves.

Smoothly leading into the fourth track, ‘River To The Real’, solidifies these previous statements by Mulvey coming to realisations and commenting on his journey to his authenticity – how all the tributaries of his life lead into one river that is ever flowing forward to reach ‘realness’. 

‘Dark Harvest Pt.1‘ is an album I think people are in need of now. An album that reveals an artists most personal experiences and thoughts, all for the hope of helping others in their own. Nick Mulvey isn’t pretending to be someone that ‘has figured it all out’ he is merely on his own river to realness, harvesting his own darkness in order to reap the fruits and flowers that can blossom from it. I for one can’t wait to see what lessons pt.2 explores!