Band:	Harboured
Album:	Harboured
Style:	Atmospheric black metal, Post-metal
Release date:	March 2023

01. Anterior
02. Impermanent Cell
03. Thy Own Destroyer
04. Atlas To Fall
05. Far Barren
06. The View

The number of musicians in metal to feature in multiple bands is so endless as to make learning of a musician’s side-project wholly unremarkable; two musicians from the same band forming a separate group is slightly less common, and raises intriguing questions regarding how substantially the new project will deviate from the style of the ‘main’ band. For example, what happens when two members of Allegaeon work on non-Allegaeon material?

Colorado seems to be something of a hotbed for metal musician collaboration; Morningstar Delirium was created by The Flight Of Sleipnir’s Clayton Cushman and Dreadnought’s Kelly Schilling, the latter of whom has collaborated with Wayfarer on their song “Vaudeville”. Wayfarer themselves are a special case in relation to the cross-band collaboration I described in the opening paragraph; rather than two of their members collaborating together in two projects, three of them are part of the same three bands (Wayfarer, Stormkeep and Lykotonon). Following in this example are Brandon Michael and Michael Stancel from Allegaeon, who have joined with Nick Henning (Vimana) and Cierra White (Oak, Ash & Thorn) to form Harboured, an outlet for Stancel to unleash song ideas incompatible with Allegaeon’s output.

By saying that, there’s a clear indication that this is not Allegaeon under another name, and that is accurate; instead of melodically inclined prog/tech death metal, Harboured lurk somewhere on the fringes of post-black metal, for lack of a more apt category for their self-titled debut. More truthfully, it’s one of those albums that has post-metal elements and black metal elements, but without merging the two in the way a Panzerfaust or Decline Of The I do. In that way, Harboured isn’t all that dissimilar to Bizarrekult’s album from earlier this year, particularly as blackgaze seeps into both albums. The final notable ingredient in Harboured is the one that is actually shared with Allegaeon, specifically an interest in melodeath, albeit to a notably lesser degree.

That’s quite a few different sounds to fit into a record that barely reaches past the 30-minute mark, but Harboured are quite efficient with their ideas. It’s not an onslaught of hectic, interchanging segments by any means, with several periods of dedicated downtime to be found, none more obvious that the multi-minute ambient synth opening to first track “Anterior”. It’s the kind of sustained introduction that leaves you somewhat surprised when you find out there is more to the song than it; at under 4 minutes, there’s not enough room for verses or choruses or anything, but there’s a fair amount of blasting and ethereal soundscaping to be heard on this song once Harboured finally pull the trigger on the quiet introduction.

One might expect, having taken the jump from ambience to blackgaze cacophony, that the first ‘full’ song would pick up right where this opening track leaves off, but there’s an immediate change of gear on “Impermanent Cell”, which starts off (and ends) as a post-hardcore song, leaving space for a mellow midsection and a brief detour into Gothenburg territory in between. The blast-heavy “Thy Own Destroyer” is perhaps the song one might have been anticipating when “Anterior” first finished, a song that fully commits to (melo)black aggression before pulling back for a slow, evocative post-metal conclusion.

As much as a song-by-song description sounds like a mess of genre namedrops, Harboured isn’t a disjointed listen; one can understand how the variety on the album emerged, with Stancel intimating that the ideas behind the album were accumulated over multiple years, but having a single primary songwriter might have helped with tying all the songs together. Certainly, the segue from that brooding climax of “Thy Own Destroyer” into the melodeath-influenced “Atlas To Fall” isn’t unnatural, nor is the brief introduction of clean singing near the end of this song after an album almost exclusively featuring tortured extreme vocals up to this point.

Should Harboured continue as a recording band after this album, it will be interesting to see whether future records develop a more overarching style that remains consistent across songs; I don’t know whether it’s necessary, as the approach taken on this record does allow every song to have its own clear identity, including the mostly tranquil closer “The View” and its brief yet triumphant synth-heavy blackgaze ending, or “Far Barren” (the song to which the ‘post-black metal’ tag feels most suited). This stylistic inconsistency does potentially have slight drawbacks, as I did find my opinion on the record to fluctuate somewhat across the first couple of spins, but after a few replays, I’ve found Harboured to ultimately be a rather rewarding listen.