90's Week: Part 1 - Harvest

There seems to be a point each year where I find myself fixated on 90's hardcore. There is something about that decade that continually draws me back, and it will stick me with delusions that it is all that I want to listen to for the rest of my life. During those deepest obsessions, I'll find myself hunched over the computer in a dark room, my face lit by the glow of the screen, scrolling through the inventory of Discogs sellers and spending money like the end of civilization is just around the corner and nothing matters anymore except the sweet rush of buying a new record. That has been the picture of me over the past few months.

After being knocked on my ass by discovering Disembodied at the start of the year, I've found myself chasing that same rush and looking for other bands that I didn't pay too much attention to in the 90's.

I owned a couple of Harvest CD's back in the late 90's, but to be honest I didn't really spend much time with them. I was all about the straight forward hardcore bands at the time, and Harvest were a bit too metallic for me to really pay much attention to. I'd give the CD's an occasional spin, but nothing really stuck with me other than the fact that it sounded like the singer was doing some weird kind of thing where he was singing the words on the inhale instead projecting the words on the exhale. I don't know... it didn't work for me then, and it had been about 20 years since I'd bothered to listen to the band.

Desperate for something more along the lines of Disembodied, I queued up the Harvest collection, Transitions, that contains all of their early 7 inches and comp songs... and holy shit, I loved it. This was exactly what I was looking for. It was chunky and screaming, angry and metallic hardcore... and I fucking ate it up.

The next step was to obviously hunt down some records, and I assumed that I'd be able to swoop in on Discogs and buy a bunch of them for relatively cheap. Surprisingly that was not the case. I guess that I assumed that people wouldn't be paying any attention to 90's metallic hardcore bands in 2025, but apparently I'm wrong. Finding any Harvest records was tough work, and what I did find, sellers weren't letting it go for cheap. Maybe I overpaid for this purple vinyl copy of this Harvest 7 inch from 1996, but I don't know, I was just desperate to feed the obsession and I grabbed it.

Harvest appeared to like contributing to comps in the late 90's, showing up on The Difference Between Us and A Document Of Nothing, and while I'm not sure I want to chase comp albums, I had no problem grabbing the blue vinyl for this Twin Cities Hardcore 7 inch comp.

Other than Harvest, I'm really not familiar with any of the bands on this comp. I actually own a Killsadie CD that I bought back in the day, but haven't listened to it since then and I couldn't tell you anything about it, but listening to their song, as well as the one from Silent Fall makes me want to check out more from these bands.