Album Review: Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows, Inexorable Opposites
Although there are certainly moments when you’re in it where one might feel surrounded by the music itself — Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows have always managed to set a mood; here they liquify one and immerse you therein — the Melbourne-based modern heavy psych rockers’ fourth full-length (third of originals), Inexorable Opposites is not without underlying symmetry. Comprising eight songs and running 43 minutes, which is enough to hold a vibe without overwhelming, the album breaks just about evenly into its two component sides, each of which has four tracks and starts with its longest one. On side A, that’s album-opener “Moss” (6:11), and on side B, it’s “Junior Fiction” (6:19). It goes further, as each of those is followed by a shorter piece in the four-minute range, one close to six minutes, and one a little over five. That happens on both sides. Now, I don’t know the band personally, and I don’t know if they’re the types to sit down and lay out a record according to how long the songs are, but that’s one way to interpret Inexorable Opposites, and while it seems superficial, it speaks nonetheless to the depth of consideration put into the band’s Magnetic Eye label-debut, which makes vibe an essential part of its audience outreach.
Tones swell and recede throughout in dynamic made to seem subtle by the most fervent of washes, and “Moss” would seem to have been picked to launch in part for the comparative heft it fosters as guitarist Tim Coutts-Smith unfurls the first semi-spoken, effects-laced verses from within the undulating maelstrom. The band that was originally a solo recording project for Coutts-Smith — and if you’re new to them, there is no Jack Harlon in the band; he’s a character in the songs; the lineup is Coutts-Smith, guitarist Jordan Richardson, bassist Liam Barry and making-his-debut drummer Brayden Becher (KVLL) — has grown in personality and complexity, and Inexorable Opposites feels cohesive, but very much so on its own terms. In addition to laying out a standard for heft, “Moss” introduces the elements of drone and noise that do so much throughout the procession that follows to fill out and flesh out the sound, to make root melodies feel expansive and to give the listener the already noted sense of depth, moving through a course that’s not only about the righteous payoffs for pieces like “Moss” and the outwardly chaotic lumber of “Junior Fiction,” but in the bliss near the end of “Mt. Macedon” or the jangly, is-that-cable-all-the-way-plugged-in distortion of “Venomous.”
Over their decade-plus, the band have been tagged numerous times with All Them Witches comparisons. That influence might still be a factor, or at least there remains some atmospheric likeness in Coutts-Smith‘s vocal delivery, but the density of “Venomous” and the open spaces being conveyed in “Mt. Macedon” and the penultimate “On the Overwhelm,” — which is to say nothing of the mellower, drumless closeout “To Die,” with its interlaced drones and birdsong ambience — craft a presence of the band’s own within the underground sphere, and especially as “Mt. Macedon” gives over to “Dave is Done” at the end of side A, the poise with which Coutts-Smith stands in the center of the weirdo cosmic tumult is enough to make one wonder if the ‘Dave’ in question is Monster Magnet‘s Dave Wyndorf, but as noted, Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows aren’t short on dramatis personae (hence the name of the band), so that’s speculation. Still, the earliest, Spine of God-era Magnet, fuller and modern in production, could likewise be a touchstone, either for the calmer stretches or the garage-y thrust of “Seer” before it slams into the its more massive nod, but as with All Them Witches, King Buffalo or any other lines one might try to draw, there isn’t a single name to be dropped that conveys everything Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows have to offer except the cumbersome one they call their own.
This sense of identity is more palpable through Inexorable Opposites than either 2023’s covers collection Hail to the Underground (review here) or the prior LP, 2021’s The Magnetic Ridge (review here), and is thus emblematic of the growth the band has undertaken, which given the walls of tone erected in “Moss,” “Dave is Done” and “On the Overwhelm,” where the lead guitar slices through sharply as if to manifest that first migraine puncture above your right eye when you’ve had enough of the crowd you’re standing in (yes I’m talking about me); a kind of progressivism wrought on the band’s own terms, reportedly more collaborative than ever with Coutts-Smith remaining as the core songwriter. The sense of trajectory that permeates across the two sides of Inexorable Opposites — less of a direct contrast than one might expect given the title, but still a feeling of movement from one place to another; ‘it’s about the journey, man,’ until you arrive — is an essential facet of what allows the songs to work so well, and with so much surrounding wash, the flow doesn’t abate even when the volume does.
That movement feels outbound. Maybe far-outbound, and among the doesn’t-seem-like-coincidence aspects of Inexorable Opposites, that “On the Overwhelm” and “To Die” cap the release is as strong an argument of intention as the heavy immersion of “Moss” and “Junior Fiction.” And “On the Overwhelm” is still plenty heavy, if transfigured with a bluesier strum in the guitar, the blown-out vocals and slow working thud of the drums at the outset as it begins its linear build, post-crescendo residual noise cutting to silence as “To Die” starts, a shimmering, sun-on-water presence instrumentally with the vocals more forward in the mix, carefully constructed but feeling too vast to be all the way controlled and that’s fine, a final sense of letting go, birds chirping behind, as if to say it’s not so bad after all, and maybe it isn’t. Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows have been carving their niche for over a decade, and dwell in it here, but Inexorable Opposites is more sure of itself even as it seems to wander in the void than the band have yet been, and is a stronger statement of purpoes for it. I don’t know that their exploring days are done, but these songs bring them to a new level of craft, and if that’s a step on the way, so much the better.
Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows, Inexorable Opposites (2026)
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Tags: Australia, Inexorable Opposites, Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows, Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows Inexorable Opposites, Magnetic Eye Records, Melbourne
The track currently streaming, ‘Venomous’, is killer! Think I’m gonna like this one.
I often get Karma To Burn vibes with their big thundering guitar work they employ.