album of the week: 11.4

HORSE The Band

Desperate Living

Vagrant Records (2009)

why you'll love it - 8bit synth!

why you'll hate it - it's metal screamo music

As the year draws to a close, here is something a bit different than the usual fare. HORSE The Band is very loud, and not in the noisy lo-fi style I normally dish out. This is a straight up "scream like cookie monster" metal kind of thing. Usually I just roll my eyes at this kind of stuff, but HTB has an ace up their sleeve - an 8bit synth.

I fully admit the only reason I listen to this band is for the synthesizer, although their humor and guitar riffs can win me over at times. Before 2007, HTB was much more versatile in their songwriting. They would cleverly work NES references into their synth lines and lyrics without sounding like they were pandering to geeks. With time, their melodies and songwriting content got more crazy and culminated in 2006, with an EP of songs about pizza.

Soon after that, they decided they wanted to be a serious band, with honest lyrics and nerfing the synth. The resulting album (A Natural Death) was an absolute disaster. HORSE The Band, you are content to play music that is of a ridiculous genre; thus can never be taken seriously! With Desperate Living, HTB is still holding on to their self-destrucive vision from the last album, but have worked a little bit of self-parody into it.

Singer, Nathan Winneke, is still screaming with a bit too much conviction; but at least this time out when he growls out an eye-roll inducing line like "sorry that you're dead", it's followed once again by a kickass synth line that sounds like something out of The Legend of Zelda. Erik Engstrom has been given more liberty to bash away with the bleep-blorps here, so the nectar I crave is back; and that is nearly all I need to justify this album's existence.

Despite still taking a good chunk of this album too seriously, tracks like the narcissistic "HORSE The Song" are a promising wink to let us know they've stepped back from the edge of pretentiousness. "Science Police" is a genuinely good song with a pace that doesn't try to ram metalcore down your throat. They need more songs like that. Droning moments of ambience ruin a few songs, such as "Shapeshifter" and "Lord Gold Wand of Unyielding". Thankfully they are met with an equal amount of insanity in other songs, which I chose not to spoil with examples.

After you cut out the embarrassing A Natural Death era holdovers, there are about eight good songs and 30 minutes of music on this album worth enjoying; which just scrapes by to let me hope that the band is back on the right track. It's no The Mechanical Hand though, that's for sure. I'd much prefer that Eric would pack up his synthesizer and start a new band at this point.