If there ever was a ripe time for Horse Lords’ blend of brainy microtonal math-rock-y complexity and outbreaks of sweaty, joyous brawn, it is right now.
On their sixth album since 2012, the now largely Berlin-based Baltimore quartet’s genre-defying mash-up of (amongst other things) the logic-defying, tightly coiled constructs of fiendishly complex avant-rock, the gradually accumulating, repetitive tension and release that nods towards the principles of minimalist electronic music, the joy in repetition evident in gamelan music and gnarly desert blues, the loops and layers of bedroom sample artists and skronk-fuelled free jazz remains a mind-twisting proposition that defies easy points of comparison or categorisation. That said, the band’s ability to make experimentation sound inviting and above all fun by forging an easy truce between intricate patterns and brute physical force can’t help but bring to a mind a similarly microtone-curious, unexpectedly high-profile Canadian duo, especially as Demand To Be Taken to Heaven Alive! adds wordlessly cooing human voices to the Horse Lords’ vast palette for the first time.
If Angine de Poitrine are the heavily caffeinated local ‘characters’ who are intent on amping up the absurd to make the most of a raucous costume party, the Horse Lords we encounter on Demand To Be Taken to Heaven Alive! are perhaps their more studious, sober-minded senior peers. There’s no time for theatrics here, as the quartet (and a handful of guests, including vocalists Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor) get to work on sustaining and amplifying pulses that are so intricately unwieldy that it takes a few listens to identify just how robust many of the grooves that anchor the ever-shifting musical motifs here truly are. Not infrequently, the tunes bring to mind a musical equivalent of a high velocity spinning top, rooted on a sturdy bounce that remains its stability even as the proceedings sprawl and swirl to more and more logic-defying, dense dimensions. For evidence, see the discordant, jazz-fuelled multi-horn cacophony that “A City Yet to Come” melts into wordless vocal trilling, or the gritty Saharan desert blues gait of “After The Last Sky”, with its slithering call-and-response patterns for guitar and horns, nodding towards the similarly gangly rhythmic prowess of NYC cult heroes 75 Dollar Bill.
In contrast to the disciplined minimalism of, say, 2020’s Comradely Objects and Extended Field, last year’s collaboration with composer Arnold Dreyblatt, Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive! speeds recklessly headfirst from one idea to the next; you can almost imagine the band’s brakes occasionally screeching as they hang on for dear life to keep the proceedings lodged safely between the ditches. It’s impossibly detailed, complex stuff, to the point where you’d half-expect to need to study a manual to keep up with it all. However, Horse Lords manage to turn their high-brow experimentation into a compelling, often deeply entertaining spectacle.
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