Multi hyphenated genres are all well and good, but these guys are taking the piss. Horseback’s 2012 album Half Blood draws from black metal, spooky rural folk, drone rock and shoegaze on this incredibly captivating record. The touchstones are disparate, but everything melts together to form a record with a gnarled surface but a lush centre of songs you can get totally lost in.
Musically, a lot of this is quite a long way from metal. Opener “Mithras” is built from a looping, hypnotic bass and organ pattern that gets pretty close to Krautrock. For me this is exactly what I want music to be - crafting or stumbling on a riff or knotted clump of riffs that are so transfixing that you can just play them over and over without getting bored. But them come the vocals, gravelly and evil but not so forceful as to be ear splitting. I concede the nature of the performance could be a deal breaker for some people, but I think it adds a lot; like some of the Norwegian stuff I’ve listened to, there’s something ancient and evil, folkloric to the performance, like a goblin’s snuck into the studio.
The record carries on in this fashion for the most part. There’s a more guitar-led, doomy riff on “Ahriman”, one of the shorter and more thrusting tracks. “Inheritance (The Changeling)” is Half Blood at its most genuinely malevolent. Feedback is teased out across the seven minute song ever so slowly, disturbing the peace bit by bit as it builds up to a shriek. It’s one of the only tracks to go heavy on the obvious electronics, as though the natural world is being invaded by outside forces.
You can figure out pretty early on whether or not you’re going to enjoy this album, and I was certainly captured from the off. This has so much of what I like in music - drones, songs that you feel like you’re tumbling into, weird shit - combined with the raw, shredded vocals and doom metal stylings that I’d never really imagined before. It feels brand new and ageless at the same time. “Arjuna”, one of the hookiest tracks, nabs from the old school stoner acts with its wah guitar and the ominous, pounding drums, but the organs hark back even further, to deep ‘60s weirdness. The combined effect is muscular and ephemeral at once.
Half Blood saves its best for last, with a triptych of increasingly lengthy tracks titled “Hallucigenia I-III”. The first is a scene setter, a singular building, buzzsaw drone. The second instalment becomes increasingly massive and ominous, almost appalachian in its plucked, sinister guitars. But the finale is the real gem. Taking a giant swing, Horseback switch to an impossibly simple, almost dance-like beat. The guitars are dragged out to infinity, one fuzzy, droning chord for the entire 12 minute piece, while keys and organs wheedle away in the background. It’s like something from Spiritualized or an early Deerhunter album, which is to say: something I really like.
I don’t quite know the audience for this sort of stuff - Horseback have under 1,500 listeners on Spotify, no Wikipedia page, and the bandleader works full time in “UX design”, whatever that is (this I’ve gleaned from his Linkedin account). On the strength of this album alone, that’s not totally surprising - this is singular, oddball stuff that’s essentially impossible to categorise, in a time when categorisation has never seemed so important. But for whatever it’s worth to the folks behind the record, it’s been a while since I’ve listened to something so thoroughly in my sweet spot.
