Leafing through my dad’s copy of Encyclopaedia of Rock as a teenager, I was eager to seek out the weirdest music I could. Reading about artists and albums was one thing, but actually hearing the music was way more complex, than it is now. The two proven ways were asking my dad or his friends if they had the actual records, or that you were fortunate enough to find a copy in one of the record shops in Edinburgh at the time.
One album became the holy grail for me during this period (the early 90s), the elusive and mysterious (No Pussyfooting) by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. The book cited the influence of another new name – Terry Riley, and promised two side long experiments in guitar layered over loops and effects of all sorts. How the music sounded, formed clearly but inaccurately in my mind. This music I imagined was based on what I knew at the point. I was studying fine art by then, and if visual things could be far reaching, then so, I reasoned could sound. This music I conjured was cluttered with a stream of ideas, superbly detailed and never stopped spiralling and evolving, a living breathing paradise.
At some point I eventually found a cassette of (No Pussyfooting) and whilst I loved it, it wasn’t quite the music I’d unrealistically hoped for. I’d not really considered longer tracks, drones or that things could be static or slow moving. My young mind didn’t have any real perspective yet, up until this point, I’d never thought this was a direction music could actually go in.
Horse Lords new album Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! somehow reminds me of the music I’d dreamt of all those years ago. 12 tracks spanning 40 minutes, the sublime Baltimore quartet (Max Eilbacher: bass guitar, computer / Andrew Bernstein: saxophone, percussion, computer / Sam Haberman:drums / Owen Gardner: guitar, percussion) providing a brimming suite of ideas. The first half of the album is peppered in short tracks, whilst durations stretch out longer on side two.
Every sound feels like it is considered in isolation. The guitar, drums, bass, brass and electronics and this time – the voices, have all been whittled into vectored typographic glyphs. Razor sharp, immaculate self-contained units, which are then assembled, layered and ordered into dizzyingly stacks. Playing out like some conceptual timeline when every new thing appears like another engrossing slither, in a stream of creative abstracted joy.
The opener Eureka 378-B wastes no time drowning in twisting the voices of Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor. This short intro, tracing sacred harp music and lyrics from primitive hymns teleported into a sequence of pristine electronic slabs. Brain of the Firm is the band walking into view with their unmistakable metronomic groves, mathy noodling and peppered in a stream of pulsing vocalisations and finally, warping electronics.
The three parts of Rotation appear between the next group of tracks but it’s here that the track list quickly dissolves. Everything is the same, everything is different, everything is contrasting and compatible. Elements rise and fall, voids open, trapdoors appear, layers force new perspectives, a stream of musical events tumble and blossom…
In fact, as is always the case, something amazing eventually seeps through this exhilarating odyssey, and it’s when the music eventually dares to settle and locks into a pattern. After The Sky is the first of the longer tracks that fill the second half of the album.
Your recent memory, by this point, has been pleasantly saturated and confused in thousands of shards and hairpin bends. Now the grooves lock in, then rise and fall incrementally before trailing off into a slowly dismantling drone.
A City Yet to Come looms even more impressively. Layers of crunching electronics, vocals and brass roll around in a 3-dimensional nirvana. An orchestra of food blenders roar before wild electronics bubble, like oil in a glass container.
The album closes with the bristling 8 and half minute lifespan of the title track – Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! Starting like bouncing ball in a gamelan before regenerating into a sun dappled march, this track immediately feels like the destination reached only via the preceding acclimatisation’s. Whether it’s a gentle head nod, maybe even an ill-advised dance around the kitchen, it’s a place that’s joyfully unshackled from the heaviness of the real world.
Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! as a whole album quickly lodges in the memory like a weird sprawling catalogue of things. A few listens do not seem to clarify anything – questions rise in your brain – have I heard this bit before? and where exactly did that section occur? Is this the end of that track or the beginning of the next? You become lost in the maze…
But being lost in the maze feels like the whole point.
Horse Lords have always locked into a restrictive palette of sound that’s part of the searing power of their music. Their music is undeniable arty, highly cerebral, it frames and references political and conceptual themes, and is deeply rooted in academic rigour. But move a millimetre in any direction within the grid and this is mind popping funk, rock and jazz.
Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! is an album we have lived in for days. It begs to be looped, shuffled and peppered through your playlists. A breath of fresh air, and an adventure every time.
An album so potent, it made me think about the first thoughts I ever had about experimental music, all those years ago.
Whatever magic is wrapped up in this newest music by Horse Lords, it makes your creative senses, your ears, brain, and imagination run riot.
Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! is out now on RVNG Intl.
Available on LP, CD and Digital from here and here
obladada.com 
An amazing album! Loved it from the moment it hit. Great review thanks.
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